Interesting, but not quite as expected
I love iA Writer, and was excited to see Writer Pro. The videos and new features were intriguing. Few documents later, though, I was a bit disappointed with this app (similarly to the previous reviewer).
The workflow control doesn’t do much, other than change the user interface and keep track of what state a document is in (more on this tracking later). The suggested workflow is “Note”, “Write”, “Edit”, and “Read”, however, all of this happens in a single document. Once you are finished with your notes and switch to writing, you are overwriting your notes. If you switch back to Note from Write mode, the document contents won’t change to your original notes; the contents stays exactly the same. The only difference between these two modes is the font. Same goes for the rest of the workflow modes with the exception of Read, which will hide the caret (disable editing), spelling/grammar underlines, and disable few menu items.
One plus for the workflow tracking comes in when you have multiple documents on the go. The open dialog in Writer Pro splits documents into “Edit”, “Note”, “Read”, and “Write” sections (in that order), conveniently listing documents on their state, making it easier to track down documents in a bit list and to see your progress. It may have been nice if the sections where numbered as to sort according to the workflow order, but you can rename them yourself if you wish.
Additionally, you won’t be able to see any of your iA Writer documents that are saved to iCloud. This may be a deficiency of how iCloud storage works (and iA didn’t advertise this as a feature), but it would have been a nice feature to have.
iA Writer users will feel in Writer Pro right at home. The overall look and feel of the app are great and what one would expect after having used iA Writer for a few years. The new syntax highlighting feature is great as well, and for this, I would give 4-5 stars. The demos and videos online seem to hype up the workflow feature the most, but this one I found the most disappointing, as it really only changes the font and colour of the caret. Combined with the new price tag of $20, I can’t give more than 2 stars overall. Here’s to hoping for future enhancement updates.
oyam about
iA Writer, v1.0