(iA)Writer Pro

by marban • 13 years ago

20 8 13 years ago

marban• 13 years ago

What's even more interesting than this rehash is the passing mention that they sold a whopping million copies of the original app.

amartya916• 13 years ago

Indeed, I would love to know a breakdown of the Mac vs. iOS app sales, especially because of the price parity.

kunai• 13 years ago

What I've found is that it's not the best-designed apps that sell the most on the App Store. It's the ones that look "beautiful" in Apple parlance – overly simplistic, bare, and stripped-down, with nice icons and good marketing.

There's nothing that I saw in iA that I couldn't get with more functionality with vim or SublimeText and some LaTeX, syntax analysis, and Markdown plugins. There's also equally nothing in Writer "Pro" (attaching Pro to the end of a consumer product seems to be all the rage these days) that seems even remotely more useful than the previous iteration. It's a simplistic and stripped-down editor that has a nice typeface and color scheme, but why does it cost $20? There's no advanced story organization features, there's a very rudimentary tree functionality for branching by headings, but you can't jump to a heading, branch them into subtopics, attach object names to them, or anything cool like that. There's little distinction between the 4 modes, and I don't see the value in not integrating the features into only 2 – writing and reading. Most people don't write drafts, edit, and then edit more – they edit while they draft, and then perform several revisions instead.

The syntax analysis looks pretty neat, but for those with above-average vocabularies and half-decent grammar, it doesn't seem to offer anything truly revolutionary.

At least not revolutionary enough to sell a million copies, and especially not at the price they're charging.

agentultra• 13 years ago

Unsurprisingly there are good emacs scripts that perform all of the revolutionary features in this product [0].

However there's something about emacs that keeps it from being sold as a viable consumer product...

[0] https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode

Update: added example link

sifarat• 13 years ago

it barely warrants paid upgrade period.

dmazin• 13 years ago

When I write, a have a lot of difficulty not revising everything I write instead of moving on to further content. I'm curious to see if how strong the modes are in the interface will help me keep to one writing mode rather than getting stuck revising.

jonthn• 13 years ago

As a rule of thumb, I only buy apps if they have an accented, tousled hair developer doing his best Jony Ivy impression to create an artificial need.

crux• 13 years ago

I really like the workflow concept and I hope it works well. But what professional writer on earth would find any value in this feature that they're so proud of, SYNTAX CONTROL™? This isn't a knock on iA Writer specifically. Writing and word processing apps have been touting this kind of thing for a long time—15 years ago it was Flesch-Kincaid scoring. This feature stuck around for ages (it's still there, I presume) despite the niggling persistent truth that for any given text written for and by fluent English speakers, increasing its 'readability' only made it more stilted, patronizing, and sort of... lobotomized.

So now there's a tool that highlights parts of speech. The problem is the same as the readability scores: the level of insight that an ordinary, untrained, consumer-level word processor can bring to bear on written English is completely trivial compared to the needs of any writer. The ability to load in vocabulary lists for what you think are parts of speech, like the ability to count word and sentence length (less so, frankly), is like the ability to detail a car with a sledgehammer.

Editing prose is a matter of taste and thus a very, very difficult problem to solve programmatically. I don't blame software developers for continuing to try. I laud them. But to bring this feature to market—indeed, to make it the centerpiece of your pitch? You have to ask what segment of the target audience would benefit. What dedicated writer is actually so adrift in the English language that they need a simple, boneheaded machine to hold their hand through the most delicate and important part of their workflow?

(iA)Writer Pro

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