
(iA)Writer Pro - marban
http://writer.pro
======
crux
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?

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

~~~
kunai
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
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](https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode)

 _Update_ : added example link

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dmazin
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.

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jonthn
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.

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sifarat
it barely warrants paid upgrade period.

