iA Writer’s “AI Detector”

[Synchronicity]

I didn’t mean “opinionated” in a negative or pejorative way at all, and I fear you missed the more important point I was making about markdown characters and prose vs. code.

Opinions can be carefully thought out and passionately held, but they’re opinions nonetheless, because unlike facts they’re subjective, and matters of values, tastes, preferences, and aesthetics. You and many others find boldface markdown characters calming and I and many others find them distracting and horsy, but neither of us is factually correct or incorrect—we just have different opinions that arise out of our own personal preferences and emotional reactions to one or the other.

I didn’t mean to imply that the developers of strongly opinionated apps like iA Writer don’t care about their users. You very clearly do, and very deeply. You just express it differently than the developers of unopinionated apps.

Neither opinionated nor unopinionated software is universally better than the other; they’re just different approaches with different advantages and disadvantages. Arc is highly opinionated and Vivaldi is highly unopinionated, and they’re both great chromium browsers. If you agree with the Browser Company’s opinions about how a browser should work, you’ll love Arc; if you don’t, you won’t. Vivaldi is more like a set of tools that enable you to use a browser the way you want to use it.

Opinionated apps are based on a vision of the way an app should work, and focus on protecting the user from making decisions that diverge from that vision. (As @ryanjamurphy said, they’re paternalistic in that way.) Unopinionated apps are based on a vision of empowering users to make decisions about how the app should work to best meet their own needs.

A decision to use an opinionated app (or simply use the defaults of a less opinionated app) is a decision to outsource decision-making to developer, which saves time and mental bandwidth. A decision to use an unopinionated app is a decision to spend time making choices and, in a sense, co-create the final app experience and tailor it to one’s own needs and preferences.

From a user standpoint, whether choosing either of those is a wise decision or not will depend on the individual and the context. There’s no single correct answer.

I’ll probably never understand why adding a setting to change highlights globally from yellow to pink was considered within bounds but adding a toggle to gray out markdown characters would be a betrayal of iA Writer’s vision, but when you choose an opinionated app you have to accept that the only opinion with the power to effect change is the developer’s.

[wappa]

@Synchronicity

I’ll probably never understand why adding a setting to change highlights globally from yellow to pink was considered within bounds but adding a toggle to gray out markdown characters would be a betrayal of iA Writer’s vision, but when you choose an opinionated app you have to accept that the only opinion with the power to effect change is the developer’s.

Another great example of what drives my frustration. As a highly opinionated user, it chafes endlessly to know that my opinions/suggestions don’t result in changes, whereas their opinions often result in changes that I see as wasteful and needless.

For what it’s worth, I would not be so upset by iA’s decisions if I didn’t feel that the app was near perfect.

[Synchronicity]

@wappa

For what it’s worth, I would not be so upset by iA’s decisions if I didn’t feel that the app was near perfect.

Caring about iA Writer—and I do—is a bit like falling in love with someone who’s so close to what you’re looking for in a long-term partner, except for this one little thing (or a few) that drives you bonkers and you can’t get used to no matter how hard you try. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and there’s something they can’t stand about you that you can’t change because it’s part of who you are.

You’re mostly having a wonderful time, and you’ve learned a lot about yourself and what you’re looking for in a life partner from the relationship. But do you really want to make it permanent and have kids together?

[Bmosbacker]

Well, I have to admit, I’ve never quite thought of my apps in those terms. I like my apps, but…

[platyhsu]

I appreciate the effort to standardize and publish the mechanics, but am not sure about the robustness of certain design decisions. For one, considering there’s already a well-established way to store metadata in markdown files, i.e., the YAML front matters, is it in the best interest of iA Writer (and the markdown “ecosystem” as a whole) to have yet another extension? Also, the current way to record ranges looks inherently inefficient to me — any single change of the text demands updating all existing ranges recorded. That said, thanks for your continuing efforts on iA Writer.

[Synchronicity]

I did say it’s a bit like that.

[Oliver_Reichenstein]

If I ran a pizzeria I’d serve only Margherita and Marinara, but I’d put salt and pepper on the table. If someone wants olives, no problem. No pineapple though. You have to have both humor and limits to what is funny.

If you use our app, you are one out of half a Million people working with it. A big proportion of them are asking for “just an olive” and almost everybody thinks that it would make all the difference. Though I’ve never heard “marriage if you add this feature” and it worries me a bit.

But we don’t serve pizza for 50 people with individually manageable special wishes. We are ten people making platform specific native apps for a collective of 500,000 people, potentially affected by every change.

No minimalism, paternalism or opinionism is needed to understand the reality of independent tech businesses. Just pragmatism.

Ps: I went and read that paternalism paper and it’s not my cup of tea: “the active participation of every stakeholder at every juncture of decision making [and] ensures that the design itself will cater to all parties equally.” These people may or may not have worked in design. I can’t see how they achieve anything I’d want to pay for with this method.

[Bmosbacker]

I encourage you to watch Apple’s WWDC 2013 Keynote Intro Video. I think it speaks your language and you will appreciate it.

[ryanjamurphy]

@Oliver_Reichenstein

Ps: I went and read that paternalism paper and it’s not my cup of tea: “the active participation of every stakeholder at every juncture of decision making [and] ensures that the design itself will cater to all parties equally.” These people may or may not have worked in design. I can’t see how they achieve anything I’d want to pay for with this method.

Fair. They’re focused on higher orders of design — making things people don’t usually pay for directly.

(From https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/what-do-we-mean-by-design/)

In those arenas, thinking you’ve got a mop or a tree trunk when you’ve actually got an elephant creates catastrophic consequences. (Literally, see for instance Romania’s late-last-century’s family planning policies, in which rules designed to increase the birth rate caused horrific effects on families and children.)

Participatory design is one of the best ways to make sure you can find the elephant in the dark.

[Synchronicity]

I admit that this is based on my own observation and participation in user forums, but when markdown apps offer a choice of source mode (which shows the markdown codes all the time) and live preview (which hides the markdown codes except when they’re being edited) a majority of their users choose live preview, while a vocal minority prefers source mode.

In the case of Typora, that’s easy to dismiss as sui generis, because they were the first to offer live preview and made it their primary differentiator, so of course they attracted a user base who preferred it.

But Obsidian offered only source mode for the first several years of its existence, and during that time they experienced the exponential growth of a highly enthusiastic user base. Nevertheless, as soon as live preview became available, most of those users switched to it.

I suspect most of iA Writer’s existing users would prefer it, too, if they could toggle it on. There’s no reason to believe that having that choice in the settings would alienate those users who prefer the current approach, as they could continue to use it as is. The choice would also make iA Writer appealing to new users in both groups.

But as you’ve expressed repeatedly here and on other platforms, you believe that those who prefer live preview are mistaken and are better off without it, and that even visually deemphasizing the codes would make iA Writer worse, even if it’s optional.

You have, of course, every right to make that call. You’re the developer, and it’s your app and livelihood.

While that decision may seem opinionated or paternalistic to some of us as customers and users, perhaps to you as iA Writer’s creator it feels more akin to an artistic one.

But that doesn’t make it pragmatic, at least not primarily.

If you disagree, perhaps you can share why devoting resources to develop a toggle to switch all highlights from yellow to pink was a strictly pragmatic decision, but offering a toggle to visually de-emphasize or hide markdown codes wouldn’t be.

[Oliver_Reichenstein]

Political design in a democracy needs to include as many stakeholders as possible. There, every user is a citizen is an owner that the designers need to not patronize but serve. The authors quote the SEoP, a wonderful source, that, as usual, offers a precise definition of the term (paternalism). This quote of a quote is my favorite part of the paper:

“The interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.”

I sympathize with that definition. I hope (and I am actually quite confident) that to most people using iA Writer this is not how we’re seen. I’m not saying this lightly. The following passage is from one of my favorite philosophical writings by Isaiah Berlin:

What I may seek to avoid is simply being ignored, or patronized or despised, or being taken too much for granted—in short, not being treated as an individual, having my uniqueness insufficiently recognized, being classed as a member of some featureless amalgam, a statistical unit without identifiable, specifically human features and purposes of my own. This is the degradation that I am fighting against—not equality of legal rights, nor liberty to do as I wish (although I may want these too), but for a condition in which I can feel that I am, because I am taken to be, a responsible agent, whose will is taken into consideration because I am entitled to it, even if I am attacked and persecuted for being what I am or choosing as I do.

I don’t have the time or the memory to explain each feature prioritization against every feature request ever made by anyone. But I remember this one:

iA Writer allows you to pick your color for highlights because we got feedback from colorblind beta testers when we developed it that they cannot see yellow. Famously, lots of men also cannot differentiate between green or red. So we said: “Let’s give them a setting, there is no best highlight color.”

iA Writer has some grey markdown elements (links and link text f.i.) and some black elements for more frequent shorter ones (*-#). Links need to be readable, but they create a lot of noise, so dimming them helps. Dimming short elements like * or # has the opposite effect because as single elements they create more noise. Since we bold headlines and render italics live they can still be recognized together with the element the affect.

We do all of this this to keep the text image as calm as possible, not to assert dominance, red pill society, degrade minorities and cement patriarchy.

Who informs what is calm and what not? Among others we serve a community of ADHD people that give great feedback when it comes to such matters because they are so sensitive about it. Not all, but a lot of them highly appreciate our app. They’re not homogenous in their suggestions (some get very upset about other details) and their diverse feedback is not always easy to implement, but we think that if it serves them well, a lot of non non ADHD people might profit, too.

We never had good results with what we internally call “the jiggle” (showing and hiding markdown depending on cursor position which can often make the entire paragraph move just because you put your cursor in an emphasized word). Not with ADHD people, not with internal testing and not with average users.

Some free apps may attract not 100s of thousands but, who knows, 100s of Millions of users(?) and make a killing with the typical 1% that pays. If they pay because of the jiggle I don’t know. I think the jiggle is free. We’re happy for the apps and their users. Based on the feedback we get, we need to do better than the jiggle if we want to go beyond plaintext markdown.

[svsmailus]

As the old adage says, “you can please some of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time”.

The good news is that there is so much software out there that everyone has a choice. This means developers can be opinionated as there are enough users that probably carry the same opinion. Other users will gravitate to software that fits their opinion. Hurray for choice.

[Oliver_Reichenstein]

Exactly. And it’s markdown. Use different apps with different strengths for different things.

[svsmailus]

@Oliver_Reichenstein

And it’s markdown

Funny you should say that. I actually gravitate towards MS Word most of the time

[Oliver_Reichenstein]

If typing on a simulated paper sheet of an eighties layout program serves you best, perfect! In the end it matters if you write well.

I want to believe that the reason why most people pick Word is more a question of following established standards than choice.

When it comes to Word I’m definitely just another blind man trying to figure out the elephant.

Okay, thank you all for your constructive input. I have to get back to work…

[svsmailus]

@Oliver_Reichenstein

typing on a simulated paper sheet

That is exactly why. I still need my information on A4 and A5. My experience with Markdown apps is that printing is extremely limited, especially with different paper sizes.

When you consider how limited in formatting Markdown is, using the same limited formatting options in Word is a breeze. I set up my styles, write my text, apply the styles and print the result. Simple, easy and quick. No weird characters on the screen, no pagination issues. Easy header and footer options.

[Oliver_Reichenstein]

Makes perfect sense. Hate to admit it but it’s still a good fit for that.

[Synchronicity]

Thank you! Choices of highlight colors to accommodate colorblind users makes perfect sense.

Since you don’t like graying out the markdown codes, perhaps you can consider rendering them in iA Writer blue. That would certainly be on-brand. (And that big, beautiful blue cursor is one of my favorite features.)

Maybe it’s my ADHD, but I do find that the current approach to rendering markdown codes makes the words they modify harder to read.

And as a writer who’s something of a stickler for details, rendering codes as if they were punctuation—that is, as if they were part of the text itself—strikes me as conceptually misguided.

So gray or blue, that option would make all the difference for me.

Of course, the choice is yours alone to make. Either way, I deeply appreciate your engagement with me and with the the others here. Not every developer is willing to do that.

In the meantime, I wish you, your team, and iA Writer all the best.

[anon93292865]

@svsmailus

I actually gravitate towards MS Word most of the time

Get out!!! …

[Bmosbacker]

@svsmailus

I actually gravitate towards MS Word most of the time

“This is the way?”