iA Writer’s “AI Detector”

Software
21

It’s still one font though. It’s called iA Writer and it comes with different character with sets. Duo has two widths adding a wider W and M for better grey value, Quattro has four widths and was added to give more space on narrow phones. Someone just praised it here, before as the only thing he likes. Maybe I misunderstood. There are so many different opinions. And everyone is somewhat right. It’s confusing, sometimes.

We thought that what we do brings minimalism to an absolute extreme: we fine tuned our font so we could alter character width, line spacing and weight depending on background color, font size and leading in a variable font to offer the best possible typographic writing experience. We thought that some may think that’s nuts.

But maybe it’s not nuts enough! Maybe we should be more extreme than that. It’s weirdly motivating to look at it this way. Please, don’t take this the wrong way.

In spite of all the praise, the appreciation, the indifference and the condescension we get here, there, and everywhere else, we try to take your love and criticism and give our seven years of free fonts and updates with all the humor we have. This is not always understood because what we blindly experience as humor, to another blind person could be experienced as a coco nut, walnut or a hazel nut chocolate power bar.

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22

:rofl: I think the analogy is quite clear. As far as the returns go: Yes, it’s markdown and we stay so true to it that the inventor of markdown uses it himself. But there’s a setting for people that don’t like to press return twice and don’t mind that their markdown is then not standards compliant. We are also aware that we used to have 0 settings and I sometimes miss these days.

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Welcome @Oliver_Reichenstein and thanks for making iA Writer. As others have said, it inspired a love of writing experiences for me a number of years ago — for better or worse (as with good taste comes recognition of bad taste).

A question about this new markup, if you’re willing and available: why not adopt Critic Markup instead of developing a new standard? Surely it would be possible to represent some of these same ideas via Critic Markup annotations.

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Personally I favored single straight quotes for machine learning in the beginning. We considered different markup solutions but managing it would be a nightmare because of the nature of editing machine generated text. Working with different LlMs we noticed that at the beginning you edit a word here and there, but in the end, if you take writing seriously, you end up changing everything (at least the people we worked with did). And then it’s a nightmare to manage and at some point it looks insane. You have lots of markup and you end up fiddling with markup instead of writing.

We wanted it to be seamless and inviting to edit. That’s why it’s grey. It’s like a game to change everything (to not lose to the machine). Someone said that “this is not really your voice”. It is if you take writing seriously. You don’t change to change. You think and rethink what you mean and working like this you can end up with a much more thought through much more sensible and sensitive result than tormenting yourself alone.

Related: Some people have commented on making markup lighter or hiding it. We have plenty of reasons why we don’t do that. One is that having the text in black for standard markdown elements like *#- makes for a calmer text image. But it makes sense to grey out links because they take a lot of space and they are not that essential while editing. Still we do not believe in hiding them in the current setup and Gruber agrees as well. It’s not proper markdown if you hide stuff. What we intensely hat is the jiggle. Showing and hiding MD depending on cursor position. Not only the sentence but the whole paragraphs jiggles when you do this.

Dealing with markup and markup design is an intense 14 year long debate and I won’t go more into details here. Long term we have other plans in making things cleaner but we’re very cautious to talk about our plans in detail before they are released. Whenever I hear people criticizing our approach I nod. But I shake my head when I read that we don’t listen or take care of typography. We do, I think, like almost no one else in our little niche. We may do other things badly, and some decisions may seem weird, but we do care a lot.

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25

One more word to people saying that it’s not a big deal to add a function with “mark as”. It was to us one of the hardest problems ever. We need to scan the text in real time to make sure everything is in sync. Then we thought about what happens when people edit elsewhere and bring their texts back.

We offer both our spec on GitHub and we cover a lot of cases generating docs as seamlessly and automatically as possible. All of this was hard to see and understand and design and shape and code to finally take this simple form we have now. There’s still a lot of work ahead but we’re quite happy with V1.

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26

To connect the discussion of ChatGPT and iA Presenter—a fantastic piece of software—I often have to present details of longer pieces of writing at meetings in presentation format. These presentations aren’t particularly important—I’m basically restating a bunch of notes I’ve taken (probably in Drafts, but possibly in iA Writer for something more substantial) over the past few months—but that I can drop the longer text into ChatGPT, have it evaluate what seems significant from my notes, edit the content into a presentation in markdown, and then I transfer the markdown to iA Presenter for edits, tweaks, and formatting adjustments has made a time-consuming process quick and efficient with high-quality output. In addition to the high-quality apps from IA and the possibilities of AI, I guess I’m simply appreciating the portability of markdown in this comment.

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@Oliver_Reichenstein,

Firstly, I want to express my gratitude for your engagement in this forum and commend your evident passion for your work. Your team and you exemplify true craftsmanship.

Secondly, I appreciate your reasoning behind not implementing a “live preview” to conceal markdown text. Although I hope you might reconsider, at least for the hyperlink markdown, I understand your perspective and value your explanation.

Lastly, thank you for your helpful and patient interaction with us. Your responses have encouraged me to reconsider iA Writer as one of my primary writing applications. When a developer demonstrates a passion for his product and such responsiveness to customers, it elicits loyalty and trust.

Thanks for a great app and, again, for engaging with us. :slightly_smiling_face:

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28

sigh

okay I’ll check out Presenter again

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29

Here’s a link to the spec on GitHub:

Personally, while I appreciate the effort, I’m confused by the misleading name (“annotations”). I’m not a native speaker, but I thought that annotations are used to indicate comments or explanatory notes on a piece of text (which is clearly different from parts of the text authored by different persons or bots).

Apart from this issue, wrapping authorship info inside a HTML comment (as suggested by Christian Tietze) would avoid breaking Markdown display for all editors that aren’t aware of this spec:

<!-- Document Settings:
Annotations: 0,95 SHA-256 1132bf5e376a605f5beed4b204456114  
@Human: 0,20 33,4 45,6 62,4  
&AI: 20,13 37,8 51,11 66,29  
-->
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People who say that (it’s not a big deal to add a function) have never released a successful app or other software into the commercial or Open Source world. If they had, they would know better than to minimize the difficulty of design and code changes that to them may seem trivial.

And I’ll add my thanks for creating the iA Writer editor!

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31

LOL!

We had one product manager who would say, “It’s only a button! How hard it is to add a button?”

She was right, adding the button is easy. Making the button do something on the other hand …

This:

To say nothing of future maintenance and support .

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32

Thanks for that. I’ve just realise that what I actually want is paragraph spacing. I don’t want to have to type return twice to see a gap between the paragraphs. Not asking for a change!

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I like your app, but I don’t use it because (as far as I can tell) I need to press return twice to make a paragraph and that really annoys me!

I realized after I replied yesterday that there is a setting in iA Writer to do that:

Settings > Markdown > Processing > Single return starts a new paragraph

34

Someone just praised it here, before as the only thing he likes. Maybe I misunderstood.

I do adore Quattro with a passion. But it’s far from the only thing I like about iA Writer, and I apologize for not making that sufficiently clear.

You’d be surprised how much I have Obsidian and even Scrivener looking like iA Writer. What I learned from using your app is that I need a writing app to look like a an artist’s studio or a workshop, not a model home or highly designed website. My drafts need to look like drafts, not finished work.

The thing about highly opinionated software with very limited customization, however—and I think you’d be first to agree that iA Writer is highly opinionated—is that as a user you have to be content with someone else’s vision and choices, down to the details, unless you’re the one in charge of the dev team. And obviously, a lot of people are content with iA Writer exactly as it is, even as some of us notice a spot here or there that chafes in a way we can’t ignore.

Having spent a lot of time on the Obsidian Discord, I’ve noticed that people who are programmers first and writers second tend to prefer source mode (which makes markdown characters visible at all times). But people who are first and foremost writers (or aren’t programmers at all) tend to prefer live preview mode, which hides markdown characters except when the cursor is adjacent to them.

I believe that’s because codes aren’t inherently part of prose the way they are part of, well, code.

In a sense, markdown codes, unlike programming codes, are an intrusion into the thing itself, which is the writing, and when they have visual emphasis equal to or greater than the prose itself, they’re visual clutter. And it seems perplexing to many of us that you find them calming, given that boldface markdown characters seem to shout rather than whisper.

It’s a subjective thing, of course, purely a matter of personal preference, and as a developer you can’t please everyone about everything.

But I want you to understand both why I’ll always be grateful to you and to iA Writer and why I don’t find myself using it as much as I otherwise might.

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35

Thanks @Synchronicity. I realised that what I actually want is paragraph spacing. I don’t want to have to type return twice in order to see a gap between the paragraphs. My eyes struggle to distinguish the paragraphs otherwise.

I appreciate you taking the time to look that up and share.

36

I despised the word minimalism because in German it means “lazy” in—for a designer—one of the worst ways (“good enough”, or “not doing more than necessary to get through”).

I have gotten used to being called a “minimalist” when it’s used as in “minimal techno”. I know that it now can stand for a thought through, considerate, well designed type of aesthetic and functional software that focuses on essence.

To most people minimal is still just a style. So I’m using it with caution. I like things with style. When style comes from character, style means something. Design is not about style primarily. Style is what you get for having character.

We are sometimes called opinionated instead. Why? Because we don’t offer a setting for everything? Or because we don’t change everything to welcome a minority of indeed opinionated features? What is an opinionated feature?

“I don’t want to type two returns, I want to type one return and see a gap.”

I need to think about it more, but at first sight, in a plain text markdown app everything considered, I would call this opinionated. Is it opinionated that I find that one return leading to a gap would be contradicting both markdown and plain text? Is it opinionated that I directly worry about double returns after every normal return like between list entries? Is everything opinionated that has a different view point, no matter how considerate? Is every developer opinionated that doesn’t just do what one or a small group of users wishes? Let’s see:

opinionated firmly or unduly adhering to one’s own opinion or to preconceived notions

… focus groups, which tend to be dominated by the loudest and most opinionated people …—James Surowiecki

We spend a lot of time and we consider every viewpoint in the way we design things. And we are not just willing to consider other people’s opinions or perspectives, we all read support mail and we do this to a point where it’s sometimes unhealthy and masochistic. Considering other people’s standpoints is how we shape our opinions. To learn you need to be ready to get hurt. The moment you learn it hurts. We end up doing:

  • What works best for the biggest number of our users
  • What is most practical and economic for our users
  • What is doable for us as a small team
  • What is sustainable in terms of long term support
  • What is performant
  • What is testable and as bug free as possible

We do this not randomly, or based on taste, or “because it’s our app” we do this considering every possibility.

And if you want to call that opinionated, then maybe we are. But until I understand the word in a positive way, like I now understand minimalism, I would say that we are very considerate and careful and open to input all the time. Yes, we have style, we have character, we focus on essence, and we follow a clear vision: To offer a beautiful and enjoyable writing experience.

Not everyone wants what we offer, and not everyone finds the experience with iA Writer pleasant because people are different. And that’s not just fine, it’s great.

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37

This is well said, though I would still characterize iA as opinionated.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that the users that share your opinions love your designs.

Another way I’ve seen this described is design paternalism.

All design is paternalistic, of course. To design is to designate — to mark, especially to mark what is important about something. But importance is often zero sum: to make one thing important, we must make others unimportant.

And there we have the double-edge. Paternalism can be frustrating because while the designer is protecting their user, they are also constraining them. This is particularly apparent when apps are “minimal” or “opinionated,” as in those apps the design theory and principles of the designer are quite strong and carefully thought through. What is important is very important, and what isn’t is eliminated.

I got the concept of design paternalism from Pramod Khadilkar and Santosh Jagtap in their 2021 article in She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. It’s a great journal!

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38

That expresses precisely and more eloquently than I did my perspective and difficulty with iA Writer. I am a writer with no experience with coding. Markdown syntax is visual clutter that interferes with my writing. I can deal with # and *, but images, hyperlinks, and such are tremendously distracting when writing. If one seldom uses pictures or links, it is okay. I, however, use them frequently, resulting in a lot of visual clutter if I use iA Writer, hence my decision to rely mainly on Scrivener and Ulysses.

Thanks for clearly expressing the issue that has frustrated me with iA Writer.

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39

Sorry, I should have tested the setting and not just looked it up. I’m pretty sure Typora does what you want when it’s in live preview mode.

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Thank you for letting me know!

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