In focus mode you find the true unique selling point of iA Writer, the focus on the sentence under construction. Note how the Markdown hash symbols are shown as simple text and compare with the effect in the Mac application window belowFocus mode The iPad full-screen view showing the focus mode in action. To the far right of the toolbar is a lock icon which, strangely, is what you use to change to the second, full-screen “focus” mode. There are slow readers and there are fast readers. I am not convinced by the rather artificial time-to-read function. In addition there is a “time-to-read” value (which the authors cite as an improvement on pagination or other forms of index) and a word count. In standard mode there is a top toolbar with icons to call up the documents list, add a new document and share by emailing the text or copying the full text. IA Writer joins a bunch of similar products in offering a clean, editing environment with the option to go full screen if you wish. If you are happy with a white background and Nitti Light type you don’t need to look further. Fortunately the chosen font, Nitti Light, is attractive and suits me because it is non-variable in width and makes for easy editing.
They claim it is a sparten setting and they’re not far wrong on that-it’s a true case of one size fits all. There are no options to change background, pen colour or font or, even, text size. To achieve this end there is minimal customisation. IA Writer aims to offer a very focused, distraction-free environment for serious writing. I purchased iA Writer for the iPad some weeks ago but hadn’t got down to evaluation. But to have both desktop and iPad apps from the same vendor is an interesting proposition. Most plain-text note applications for iOS have no desktop version, although it is an easy matter to use TextEdit, WriteRoom or one of the many other plaint-text editing progams for OS X. When I read that Information Architects’ iA Writer¹ for iPad had a desktop companion I felt duty bound to download and try them out.
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