Dec 18, 2013 When we want to hunker down and type without distraction, one of our favorite resources is iA Writer. Substantially updated since its initial release, this writing app offers a customizable keyboard, selective text highlighting, iCloud sync, and many other features we’ve come to depend on.
iA Writer (for Mac)
Ia Writer Download
Pros
- Distraction-free style.
- Supports Markdown.
- Can export directly to Medium and WordPress.
- Relatively inexpensive.
Cons
- No included templates.
- Few tools for organizing and arranging files.
Bottom Line
Taking minimalism to the extreme, iA Writer may have the fewest built-in distractions of any writing app. It's inexpensive and a great choice for bloggers and short-form writers.
Which font do you want to write in today? What kind of line spacing looks best? If these kinds of questions distract you from putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), iA Writer may be the best writing app for you. It eliminates nearly all the distractions found in word processing apps to help you focus on the text. The app supports typing in Markdown for basic formatting, although there are some built-in buttons for adding bold, italics, and the like if you're more comfortable doing it that way. iA Writer is available for Android, iPad and iPhone, macOS, and Windows, with each app sold separately for a relatively low price. For short-form writers in search of minimalism, iA Writer may be the best writing app available. Long-form writers working on screenplays or books may find its toolset too light, however.
If iA Writer doesn't sound like it's for you—it's not for everyone—then consider one of our three Editors' Choice picks instead. Scrivener is best for books and long academic works, as it has ample tools for organizing research and other background notes. Final Draft is ideal for professional screenwriters because it knows the ins and outs of industry standards. Lastly, Ulysses is our top pick for distraction-free writing apps, and it's a good choice if you find iA Writer too lightweight.
iA Writer Price and Platforms
Since PCMag last reviewed iA Writer in 2017, its prices have gone up. The Mac app now costs $29.99, whereas it previously cost one-third of that. There's an iPhone and iPad app for $8.99, which used to cost less than half that. The company has added a new Windows app ($19.99). Its Android app continues to be free for the time being.
You can download the Mac and Windows apps and get a 14-day free trial. To sync your work across these apps, you'll need to save your files into a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox or iCloud.
While iA Writer's prices are higher than they once were, they're still quite low compared with other options on the market.
How Do Its Prices Compare?
When you look at the market for writing software, iA Writer is a comparatively lightweight app. It makes sense, then, that its prices are lower than those of more specialized writing apps. For example, writing apps designed for professional screenwriting cost a whole lot more.
On the high end, Editors' Choice Final Draft, a standard in the professional screenwriting world, costs $249.99. A similar app called ScriptStudio costs $199.95.
A more lightweight app that's closer to iA Writer in its abilities is Byword, which costs a mere $10.99 for macOS and $5.99 for iOS, giving you a combined total price of about $17. That's certainly less than iA Writer's combined Mac-iOS cost of about $39. With iA Writer, you can get apps for Android and Windows, too, whereas Byword doesn't offer those.
Editors' Choice Scrivener costs $49 for its desktop app. Tack on an additional $19.99 for its iOS app, and you're looking at $70 flat for the pair. That's roughly 44% more than iA Writer. Keep in mind that Scrivener has many more tools than iA Writer and is better suited for handling long-form work, including all the research and notes that goes into producing it.
Perhaps you've noticed by now that writing apps tend to sell for a flat, one-time price rather than a recurring subscription fee, which is the direction the rest of the software industry has taken. The rationalization is writers have an easier time budgeting for a one-time expense, whereas coughing up a monthly or yearly payment is more difficult, due to the way screenwriters, book authors, and other types of professional writers get paid.
There are exceptions, however. Editors' Choice app Ulysses charges $4.99 per month, $10.99 for six months, or $39.99 per year. Another subscription-based app called WriterDuet costs anywhere from $60 per year to $119 per year, depending on the plan you choose.
Getting Started
iA Writer is among the most basic writing apps I've ever used. It does have some neat capabilities, but they're not at all apparent when you look at the stark white interface. There are no included templates for getting started or suggestions of files or folders, though you can download a few from the company's site.
To test iA Writer, I primarily used the Mac app though I also had installed and fiddled with the Windows app. When you first get started, the app opens to a blank document so that you can start typing immediately.
It's worth your time to have a quick poke around first to get acquainted with iA Writer's options and features, however. On the left side you can see your storage locations. The Mac app puts iCloud there by default. In the Windows app, it's a little less apparent what the rail is for until choose a save location on your computer and see it appear there. You save to any local storage, whether it's a folder on your hard drive or a folder that syncs to a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox.
iA Writer does not offer any storage of its own. You are always 100 percent in control and responsible for your files. If you want to sync your work or create backup copies, that's entirely in your purview. Some writing apps do offer included storage, such as WriterDuet. The problem is that, unless you create a backup copy of your work, you never know for sure where your files are. Plus, if anything goes wrong with the app, you're at someone else's mercy to help you get your documents back. WriterDuet lets you make backup copies locally, but only if you're a paying subscriber. If you use the app for free, you don't have the option.
Markdown and File Transclusion
iA Writer's signature feature is support for Markdown. Markdown is essentially the opposite of what you see is what you get, or WYSIWYG, word processor formatting. With Markdown, you put underscores or single asterisks around words that you want to appear in italics _like this_ or *like this.* Make it double asterisks, and your words turn bold **like this.** A pound or hash (#) before a line means it's the title. Make it a double hash (##) and you have yourself a subtitle.
In my experience, people who use Markdown are converts. They tend to have strong opinions about why they absolutely cannot write any other way. iA Writer is a great writing app for those people. Me? I've never cared for it. I get frustrated that Markdown isn't implemented uniformly across apps. iA Writer has a solution for those of us who are not in the Markdown camp. We can apply formatting with standard menu tools and keyboard shortcuts instead. It's the best of both worlds.
Ulysses also lets you use Markdown, and that app gives you an easily accessible cheat sheet that includes a dozen or so characters and what they mean. It's a handy reference for novices. iA Writer doesn't have that.
File transclusion, which iA Writer sometimes refers to as Content Blocks, also sets iA Writer apart from other writing apps. File transclusion is a way of pulling content into your text file without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Let's say you want to embed an image in your file. Instead of opening a file chooser and selecting the image you want, you type a short command that essentially says, 'put this image here.' It works with not only images, but also tables and blocks of text. It's useful and a time-saver if you tend to use the same verbiage or images over and over again, such as boilerplate text and company logos.
The code you write to make the magic happen is simple enough. You type a forward slash and then the file name, and if the file is saved to iA Writer, the app knows to pull in the content. If the thought of typing anything even loosely resembling code gives you the heebie-jeebies, iA Writer isn't for you.
Just as you can avoid Markdown in iA Writer if you choose, you can avoid using the file transclusion method, too. There is a file picker for adding images and an assistant for creating tables as well. But the point of having these two features is that they let you write uninterrupted, without ever lifting your fingers from the keyboard.
Interface and Features
iA Writer's interface has very little in the way of clutter. The idea is to focus on your writing by stripping away distractions, such as formatting toolbars and font options. That said, the app isn't totally devoid of options. If you don't like the default typeface, you can swap it for another one, but only from a total of three choices: Mono, Duo, Quattro.
The app has a few views or modes that can enhance your focus. Sentence Focus Mode, for example, puts only the active sentence (depending on cursor placement) in full brightness. Other text around it appears in gray. There's a similar mode for focusing on paragraphs. These options are within easy reach at the upper-right corner of the composition window.
Another view, called Typewriter Mode, keeps the cursor on the same line and rolls the text up as you type, like a typewriter. Night Mode inverts the black text on white background setup.
A Preview option shows how your final text will look once you export it. Since I last reviewed the app, I like Preview mode a lot more now. It used to look almost identical to your composition in progress. Now, it looks both more distinct and more polished, like an actual finished product.
One unique feature in iA Writer is Syntax. It applies color to the text to show verbs (blue), adverbs (purple), conjunctions (green), and so forth. If you're actively working to improve your writing, it might help you spot problems that you'd otherwise overlook. For example, how much do you rely on adverbs? Are your verb choices varied? In Syntax mode, you can turn different parts of speech on and off at will. So if you only want to see verbs, you can.
To the left, in a column that's parallel to your storage locations, is your library. The library contains a list of all documents you've created and edited in iA Writer, and it lets you jump from one document to another. In that way, iA Writer is similar to the note-taking app Evernote.
I want to briefly compare iA Writer's library to that of a more powerful writing app: Scrivener. When you first get started with Scrivener, you can choose a template, such as Novel, and the app populates the library with sample material specific to your template. If you've never used Scrivener to write a novel before, you don't necessarily know all the ways the app can help you complete the work. So Scrivener shows you. It creates spaces in the library for research and character sheets, for example. iA Writer, you could make files for research and character sheets, but the app never suggests that you do. All those details are up to you. Whereas iA Writer is like a blank slate, Scrivener is like a writing coach.
Back to the point about iA Writer's similarities with Evernote: You could use iA Writer to take notes. People do. But you'd be missing out on some great features that are unique to the best note-taking apps. With a note-taking app, you can snap a picture of some text using your phone and have the note-taking app make the text searchable. You can also record audio memos and upload PDFs. iA Writer doesn't have those tools.
When your text is complete, iA Writer can export it as Markdown, .html, .pdf, Microsoft Word (.docx), or as a Project Archive. Alternatively, you can send the text directly to Medium or WordPress, provided you connect to one of those publishing platforms.
What's Missing?
iA Writer does not have sharing or collaboration features. If you're used to working with co-authors in real time, stick to Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online. To be fair, collaboration isn't seen in many distraction-free writing apps, the exceptions being Final Draft and WriterDuet. Even there, it's limited. Final Draft requires all collaborating parties to own a copy of the software and allows only one writer to touch the document at a time. WriterDuet handles it better, but it's expensive, whereas Google Docs is free.
Another hurdle that iA Writer doesn't even attempt to clear is the matter of writing in pieces and rearranging them into a final product. With long-form writing, authors sometimes change the order of chapters or scenes as they go. Other apps, like yWriter, Ulysses, and Scrivener see the ability to move parts around as essential. You can write scenes or chapters, change their order in the library, and then export the finished product into one document when you're satisfied with it.
iA Writer also doesn't claim to be a screenwriter's tool. Writing apps for screenwriters help them format scripts to industry standards, making sure each character's name appears in all caps and that lines of dialogue are centered. Final Draft is the leader among apps for screenwriting, though many other apps also support it.
There are other interesting features in some writing apps that don't necessarily make or break them, but are still worth mentioning. Corkboard views are one example. They're absent in iA Writer, but do appear in Scrivener and Final Draft. Corkboard views give you a different way to visualize elements of your writing, pinning virtual notecards to a virtual corkboard. You can use them however you want, although most writers use them to move around scenes and change the order of their book.
Low Cost, Distraction-Free
What might hook you on iA Writer? It has four major draws: First, its distraction-free style helps you focus on the writing rather than the interface and options. Second, it doesn't cost much. Third, it's ideal if you mostly write short-form pieces, such as blog posts and articles. Lastly, it's really meant for people who love Markdown. If you tick those four boxes, then iA Writer is the app for you.
If your goal is to find a writing app that helps you produce pages and then easily compile and export the result into a professional looking manuscript, Ulysses and Scrivener are better apps. Ulysses is Mac-only and sticks to the distraction-free style, while Scrivener is available for both macOS and Windows, and it offers a more traditional software experience, with WYSIWYG formatting, templates, and other structure features. Working or aspiring screenwriters are best off with Final Draft. Its cost may seem comparatively high, but you'll probably get two or three years out of the app before needing to pay for an upgrade.
