IA writer seems to be launching new stuff soon, including a new app icon and improved organizational features. I use Ulysses, but I like IA and especially their resistance to adding new things. It is, after many years, still a digital typewriter, improved occasionally.
But it has one significant feature that many others miss: by forcing you to stare at its blank, sterile and inescapable interface, you will realize how terrible your ideas and writing are. (If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you. - F. Nietzsche)
The emptiness of IA writer causes your thoughts, hopes and willpower to surrender. Then, after deleting what you considered original and sharp for the fifth time, you might find the idea and voice that speaks to you, realizing there’s no other way than this.
IA writer gives your insanity form. It doesn’t let you hide your failures in outlines, templates, sketches, projects etc. In other apps, this route to rock bottom loses its rawness.
The reason for the title “Weirdness of time” is that as time and tools progress, the quality goes the other way. New and modern apps want to take the burden off and “let you focus on” … everything except realizing who and where you are as a writer. IA writer does the opposite. It gives you the burden of creating something worth reading.
I’m generally in agreement, and everything being equal, I’d like to use iA Writer. However, everything is never equal. My two issues with iA Writer are:
There is no way to see an outline of a long-form article. I find an outline indispensable for maintaining flow and context while writing.
The markdown syntax is too prominent and distracting, which, in my estimation, contradicts the developer’s goal of distraction-free writing. I know others have a different perspective on this matter. I don’t need the markdown to disappear; I just need it to fade into the background so I can focus on my written text.
If the developers address those two issues —and it is a big if—I’d reconsider using the app for my writing.
I like the thought. iA can get writing out of me that other writing environments don’t. I credit the design: UI, size of the prompt, typography rewarding getting words down. No sidebar probably contributes. I find it to be more of an inviting than challenging/forcing writing environment, though.
I still don’t understand the dev’s resistance to adding an simple option to make the markdown symbols less prominent (ie, greyed out). It’s not the sort of setting you’d waste writing time configuring—it’s as simple as any preference toggle could ever get.
There’s a relatively convenient workaround in iA Writer for this using transclusion. You can have a master document that is simply a list of links to all the subdocuments from which a longer document is compiled. You can then rearrange these chapters in the master document.
so e.g. in the master document, you simply have:
Chapter 1.txt
Chapter 2.txt
Chapter 3.txt
iA Writer will help autocomplete filenames if you start the line with a slash (/), but will recognise filenames regardless if typed out correctly.
Compared to Scrivener’s scrivenings mode and similar features in other apps, it’s always seemed to me that using a master document with content blocks would mostly appeal to users who love iA Writer’s other qualities enough that they’re willing to put up with a kluge to make it work for longform writing.
Exactly how I’d describe it. I tried it and it felt jerry-rigged. I’m extrapolating, but it seems like a solution that only someone who likes to code would want to use.
The Windows version has had an outline and folding headers for over five years. Iirc, it’s because the Windows toolkit they’re using has built-in support for those features, but Swift doesn’t, which would make them expensive to add, since the the necessary code would have to be written from scratch.
Yes, I know the Windows version does offer this feature. But I’m not so sure your full take on the Mac version is correct. I trust what you say re: Swift not having built-in support for this feature. However, I know of at least two products that offer just this feature. The one I use, Nota, is developed by two very young developers. (Aside: they may be good developers, but they don’t know how to run a profitable business.)
For example, see the attached screenshot. My point here is that this capability may not come out-of-the-box, but it also doesn’t seem truly expensive or difficult to implement … others have done it with fewer resources. It’s a weird one … maybe they need a better developer, maybe there’s a strange philisophical hesitation … I have no idea what the real problem is. But cost and expertise don’t seem to be the inhibitors.
It’s not my take. It’s the iA Writer dev’s publicly stated reason or excuse. I assume it’s asserted in good faith and valid from their standpoint, but as a non-programmer I don’t know what it would actually take to implement those features in a native macOS toolkit, and I’m not privy to the extent of their financial or coding resources.
The term we use internally is not “The weirdness of time” but “The present of time”. Not just writing, but good work in general offers the present of time.
Beautiful writing takes time for the writer and offers a good time to the reader.
Good cooking needs time—but then makes the person eating forget all clocks.
Great design uses up a lot time for the designer and dev—but makes time fly for its users.
Good work takes time. I want to believe that’s why everything little we do always takes forever. Unlike most tech companies, we resist pressure and deadlines and take our time to get things right.
It’s a bit crazy sometimes. Sometimes, I have doubts about our slow obsessed ways. We’re about to launch the basis for outline. It took half a year. The basis! The actual outline will yet again take time. We can’t tell you how much. We don’t know. Others may ship faster, cleverer and they may be much more charming overall. Good for them. All we can do is to continue giving our best.
You sound like the Bear developers. Good; the Apple ecosystem needs more heavyweights like you to counteract the rise of Electron apps, which not so coincidentally make it easier to leave Apple for either Windows or Linux…
Electron apps would be so much easier for us as devs. They work on all platforms and they’re easy and cheap to develop for. People don’t care about native vs electron… until the apps become slow, bloated and so complicated that you need to learn and configure tons of stuff before you can write a simple article. Native apps feel so much better to type in but they’re old difficult, slow and expensive to make…
@Oliver_Reichenstein I believe I’ve shared this before, but if not, I want to let you know how much I appreciate what you guys write about writing. When I read your articles, I find myself nodding in strong agreement.
I’m looking forward to the possibility of the outline feature coming to iA Writer for Mac and iOS (and possibly folding headers). Still, regardless of the features, your take on the value and process of good writing is spot on.
Thank you. Folding is just not on the roadmap. Having to support a custom built native textview and keeping it compatible with future platform and standard textview changes from Apple is just too expensive for us… especially since very few people really use folding in iA Writer for Windows.
File organisation is a different matter. It’s our top priority.
You’ll get tree view inside the file browser (no more rolling columns) with this release, in review by Apple now, propagating any moment now. It looks tiny and obvious but it was a lot of detail work and it’s a big improvement. We had to rebuilt all of that finder magic inside the apps. It looks obvious but was tricky to make it work seamlessly on all platforms.
Outline will be unlike anything out there and yet it will feel very obvious. Chances are that you won’t miss textview folding at all. As some of the less careful implementations out there show, folding can be confusing.
I think the full power of content blocks (and the until now somewhat lonely organiser) only comes to light with tree view where navigation through the file system and moving content blocks across folders or into the editor now is seamless.
The issue isn’t to have an outline per se when your are previewing/printing a document. It all has to do with editing: so one can easily move to various portions of the document to work on an edit. I’m not seeing how that works with your approach …
@Oliver_Reichenstein I really look forward to seeing how outlining works. I’d love to work within iA Writer all the time … such a great app. But for longer documents I definitely need to have some way to move around within the document/project very simply and efficiently. Very happy you are moving in that direction … even if it takes time. Many thanks.
