Back to (testing) IA Writer

Back to (testing) IA Writer

The folks at IA just released a new version of IA Writer, a minimalist writing app for iOS and Mac1 that now supports publishing on micro.blog in addition to WordPress, Ghost, and Medium. Since I just re-started testing micro.blog I am now back to testing IA Writer too.

I've been loving this app for a while before moving all my writing in Ulysses. The competition between the two has led to lots of interesting features, but in my experience, Ulysses has always been ahead in terms of what you can do with the app. Ulysses is far away when it comes to writing books, exporting, and managing documents. You can do that even with IA Writer, but it's a bit tricky.

IA Writer, on the other hand, has always been the most beautiful app to look at when writing out of the box2, and it has that syntax highlighting feature that helps you write better highlighting adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, nouns and verbs. In my opinion, it works great for English, less for Italian, and since I mostly write in my native language this didn't make a difference for me. But since I decided to start writing also in English to improve my knowledge of the language, now it does make sense.

Stay tuned for a more in deep comparison.

Written and published with AI Writer. Actually written only. IA writer saves a draft for you in micro.blog and you have to publish from there. The worst thing is that it saves html and not markdown by default. You have to check the option in the account option, but you are never prompted to do that. I went to look for this feature after discovering my post was in html. Additionally, if you pick markdown as an option to publish your post, you won't find any content in your micro.blog post: bug! Even worst: if you have a testing blog on your micro.blog, posts will be published on that without any option for you to select the live blog. And, finally, if you set a title in your document in AI, it will result as a duplicated title on micro.blog. Really bad experience. I ended up copying and pasting the markdown

  1. Recently it was released even for Android and Windows, but it's not the same thing. ↩︎

  2. You can customize mostly anything in Ulysses ↩︎