IA Writer 5.2.5 MAS Mac OS X 22 MB. Keep your hands on the keyboard and your mind in the text. IA Writer makes sure that all your thoughts are kept i. Timeline表示で、 移したいエントリーの上を、左右どちらかにスワイプ、 フォルダみたいなアイコンをタップすれば、 移動先の Documents 5 - 高速 PDF リーダー、ダウンロードマネージャ 販売者名 Igor.Byword、iA Writerあたりが 「iA Writer Classic (Legacy Support Edition.
IA Writer is a text editor. A stripped back, race-tuned greyhound of a writing app. There’s nothing fancy or complicated. That is its attraction.
You can start putting words together within minutes of installing the software.
It is the most productive writing tool I’ve used since learning to type on manual typewriters. It could be the software you are looking for.
You can keep your fancy, feature-rich word processors. They have their place, but they are not always the most productive tools.
I keep a copy of Microsoft Word on my Mac to stay compatible with clients and co-workers. That way there’s no chance of anything slipping between the cracks in a complex editing job.
iA Writer first
Yet when it comes to writing a newspaper feature, a blog post or commercial copy, iA Writer is my first choice. Every time.
That’s because iA Writer’s minimalist approach gets out of the way. There’s no temptation to mess around choosing the right font for this communication. You won’t wonder if the crosshead typeface you’ve chosen is a good fit with the body.
You don’t have choices. There’s nothing to tinker with. Or, at least, not much.
![Writer Writer](https://2672686a4cf38e8c2458-2712e00ea34e3076747650c92426bbb5.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/2019-05-09-19-51-53.jpeg)
Instead you can focus on your words.
Over the years iA Writer has evolved. It does more today than it did when I started using it about five years ago. Yet you couldn’t accuse it of feature bloat. It remains simple.
Works everywhere you do
One advantage of keeping the software simple is that you get a near-identical experience whether you are writing on a large screen desktop Mac, an iPad or an iPhone.
For years iA Writer was an Apple experience. Today you can get versions for Windows or Android. The cross platform experience is almost as smooth as staying in Apple’s walled garden. This makes it an excellent choice for people moving between Apple, Microsoft and Android.
Text editors in general tend to be a form of lowest common denominator. IA Writer has this to a T.
iA Writer 5.4
Earlier this year iA Writer moved to version 5.4. That added features such as local storage, new export options and context menus.
If this was an ordinary product review, at this point I’d run through how these feature work in practice. But I won’t because I find I never use them all. My understanding of them is abstract. I’ve tested them and seen they work as advertised, but they don’t get a second glance in the heat of battle.
You can do something complex with blocks of copy, which you can insert as content blocks in your document. Again, I’ve tested, but never needed this. It may be the feature you’ve been looking for.
Made for cloud
The new feature that I do use is the ability to make local copies. In normal use iA Writer stores documents in your iCloud account. Because each document is tiny, files are tiny. You won’t chew through iCloud storage the way you might with word processor documents.
For a while iCloud integration was buggy. At times you couldn’t be sure they document was where it should be. Having local backups meant you never faced losing an afternoon’s writing brilliance.
In May iA Writer moved to version 5.5. In part the upgrade brought the software in line with the new features in iPadOS. You can now use a trackpad or mouse with the software on an iPad. Not that I’d want to do that.
Markdown
We’re 600 words into this post and there has not yet been any mention of Markdown. This is a simple markup language that lets you format your text. Type a * symbol either side of a word and it will show up in italics. Put two * around a word and it is in bold.
There are a handful of these Markdown commands to memorise. It doesn’t take long and it means you can keep your hands on the keys without reaching for the mouse or trackpad.
That way you can type faster. It’s more efficient. As a bonus, you are less likely to get a repetitive strain injury. The commands soon become hardwired in your fingertips. Yet I must confess there are times I have to look up the more obscure ones.
In iA Writer 5.5, there’s a new Markdown code. Two equals signs around a word will highlight it. That’s like the yellow marker you find in word processors. It’s hard to miss.
You’re either going to love Markdown or hate it. It works for me. I recommend giving it a try before deciding. There are free trial versions of iA Writer 5.6.
PDF viewer
The other 5.5 upgrade was the addition of a PDF viewer. When I write for my website1 I can publish text direct to WordPress. All the formatting comes with the words. If I work for a client who needs a Word document, yes that is almost every client, I can save my iA Writer document in a docx format.
Adding the ability to save in PDF format takes this further. Yet, like many new features, I don’t use it. Or, more accurately, I haven’t used it yet.
That’s not the point. Each feature upgrade expands the software’s reach to users who need more than basic text editing but not as much as a word processor. IA Writer rolls out a few new features every year, but you couldn’t say the software is bloated or even on the road to bloated.
iA Writer 5.6
We’re now at iA Writer 5.6. It’s been around now for a month. The latest version adds a style checker. It could help improve your writing. The checker looks for cliches, fillers and redundancies. When they appear in your text, they are grey.
You can choose to edit them if you wish.
I don’t always agree with the software style decisions. Journalism relies on short simple language. While that can get hackneyed, it’s a way of getting a message over fast.
And there are words iA Writer 5.6 doesn’t approve of, like also or too, that are useful for journalism.
Good housekeeping
The remaining updates in iA Writer 5.6 are all background housekeeping things that developers do and casual users may not notice. Files now open faster, but that was never an issue for me. The noticeable background update is that huge iA Writer files don’t slow down.
IA Writer’s price has climbed over the years. When I first bought the software I paid NZ$3. It was a promotional price. Today the software costs US$30 for the Mac and $9 for the iPad or iPhone. You can get it from the relevant app store. There are free trial versions.
You have to buy both if you plan to use the software on a Mac and an iOS device. I don’t begrudge it. Hazel v2 8 download free.
Compared with the alternatives it’s a bargain. You have to pay roughly four times that amount every year to use Microsoft Word.
Other word processors can cost more. This is important. Journalists and others who write for a living get paid in ways that make it hard to budget for a regular subscription. A flat one-off fee is better. You know where you are and you know for certain there will never be a month where you face not paying the software subscription or skipping a meal.
Critics
You’ll see critics complain that iA Writer doesn’t have collaboration tools. In part that’s because the idea of collaboration doesn’t sit well with distraction-free writing. Nothing is more distracting than someone jumping it with an annoying, pedantic edit while you are crafting your next perfect piece of prose.
Collaboration is important. It is not the be all and end all of working with others.
The upside is that it’s easy for iA Writer to work in with collaboration tools. At times when I’m asked to work with, say, Google Docs, I will write first in iA Writer, then load the text into a shared Doc for the editing party to begin. I’ve been known to pull paragraphs or sections from the shared document, paste them into iA Writer, make my edits and return the text.
IA Writer isn’t for everyone. Many people feel they need the handholding they get from a product like Word. Or they feel comfortable using the same thing as everyone else. There are companies, clients and individual managers who will insist you use Word.
When I was thinking about this idea earlier, it occurred to me there is an analogy with music. IA Writer is to a word processor what, say, a fretless string instrument is to a guitar or keyboard. If you are on top of your writing game and confident, you can get better results without the guiding baggage. If that’s not you, then fine. You have alternatives.
- As an aside, I’m using iA Writer 5.6 now and there’s a neat set of Markdown codes for creating footnotes. ↩︎
It's been about 18 months since I last looked at iA Writer. My review, which was generally favourable, continues to be one of my most popular posts. When I tweeted that I'd reached more than 1100 views, the developers of iA Writer took notice and called me out stating my original review no longer reflected the current version.
That’s great. Desperately needs an update though as it doesn’t reflect the latest version. ?
— iA Writer (@iAWriter) 10 July 2018So, not wanting to do them a disservice I decided it was time to review iA Writer 5. Civic virtue aside, I was also curious to see if the current version addressed my previous niggles. Let's find out!
What’s new
Firstly, let’s look at some of the new features in iA Writer 5. As a release it certainly doesn’t lack for shiny new stuff — and, a fresh lick of paint for many of the existing features.
User interface
By far the most significant changes — and improvements — are the user interface (UI). There are refinements both to layout and the general aesthetics of the app.
Tool- and formatting bars
Back in iA Writer 4, there was a common toolbar on the bottom of the editor where you could either access markdown shortcuts or configure syntax highlighting. In iA Writer 5, this has changed, and for the better.
Syntax and focus controls are now on the top bar. They are available from a convenient drop-down box, and then fade away when not used. The arrow icon to the right of the drop-down activates the preview — as does a two-finger swipe on the trackpad, which is what I mostly used.
Markdown shortcuts are now on the bottom, along with the document statistics.
Splitting these options into separate toolbars makes a lot of sense. iA Writer 4’s grammatical syntax toolbar was a waste of horizontal space — and syntax highlighting isn’t something I frequently change, mostly setting it to adverbs and then forgetting it. Meanwhile, it’s much more useful to keep markdown shortcuts persistent, particularly for those who prefer activating them through the trackpad instead of the keyboard.
Syntax highlighting hasn't changed much since iA 4. Meanwhile, Scrivener 3’s implementation has leap-frogged iA Writer with many more options, including the ability to highlight direct speech, something that’s equally useful to the novelist as hunting down adverbs. Still, it’s one up on Ulysses, which doesn’t support this feature at all.
Editor
iA Writer still remains incredibly opinionated in matters of design. You still can’t theme the editor to your own tastes as you can in Ulysses.
As you can see from the settings controls above, all you can do is change text size, typography and the number of characters displayed per line. As for the typography, all you can choose from is the provides Mono, Duo and Quattro. iA began life as a type design company, and they are quite proud of their fonts. They look lovely on screen — even on a non-retina display — but if your tastes don’t align with iA’s, or you have a particular theme you like…look elsewhere.
While I can accept this for writing non-fiction, the inability to indent lines is disappointing. Even though I’m happy to draft most things in plain text, I still prefer to observe some formatting conventions when I write fiction. I also prefer to write in Menlo and screw you iA for thinking your tastes matter more than mine.
iA Writer’s key differentiator is its obsession with focus. You can focus on your current paragraph, sentence or step back to the 1960s with typewriting mode.
While I don’t personally care for this feature, I certainly appreciate that others do, and it’s a big selling point for the app. It’s not the only app that does this, but as far as I can judge, it’s done well in iA Writer.
Hashtags
iA Writer 5 introduces the concept of tagging. Tags are created by
#tagging
keywords with the # character. In many respects, these behave similarly to keywords in Scrivener and Ulysses, but with one notable exception — tags in iA Writer are embedded within the document text itself.In this respect, the feature is similar to Bear Notes, but there are a few differences. In Bear Notes, you can create nested tags, allowing you to create a hierarchy, which is pretty cool. That’s not possible in iA Writer, then again it’s not something you can do in Scrivener or Ulysses either. Tagging is Bear Note’s sole means of organisation, whereas, in iA Writer, you still have library folders to create any hierarchical structure you need.
Unlike Bear Notes however, iA Writer gives you the option to exclude your hashtags from exported documents. This is a really nice touch. Bear’s inability to remove tags from exported notes is one of the reasons I don’t use the app.
The only quirk I found with hashtags is that if you import documents where your markdown headings are joined to their hashes, they’ll be interpreted as tags, not as headings. I experienced this first hand when I imported a bunch of old world-building files I had laying around in DropBox.
Tabbed interface
Another nice feature is the introduction of document tabs. Bizarrely though, I couldn’t find the means to select a document in the Library and open it in a new tab. To do this, I had to open a new tab (Cmd+T) then choose the document from the Library. I personally would have liked a right-click open, as you can do in Ulysses and just about any text editor on the planet.
Tabs are all the rage in macOS these days, and while I appreciate the feature what would be even better for writing complex projects is split-view, like you have in Scrivener, or text editors like Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code. Instead of that, iA Writer does allow you open documents in new windows so you could fake the split view using macOS’ full-screen split screen.
Markdown
I salute iA Writer for its outstanding support of MultiMarkdown. Even when files in iA Writer have a text extension (*.txt), the editor still provides elegant markdown syntax highlighting, as well as a full complement of keyboard shortcuts, and even a table generator.
Tables are glaringly absent from Ulysses, so for writers who need native table support, iA Writer is clearly the better choice. In iA Writer there’s still no elastic tab stops, like in MultiMarkdown Composer, so tables in the editor continue to be a little messy. Nevertheless, iA Writer has a neat feature where you can link to an external CSV file. Editing a table in a spreadsheet app, and then exporting to CSV is much more conducive than messing around with pipes and tabs.
Performance
Performance continues to shine, as it did in iA Writer 4. The UI is fast and responsive. Previews are generated rapidly, and there are no issues with lag even with substantial documents.
The Library
iA Writer 5 has overhauled the library. This new version embraces iCloud, no longer limits you to the number of folders you can nest.
A key differentiator with Ulysses is that iA Writer is much more transparent in how it stores and manages your files. Files continue to be plain text and easily accessible — even in iCloud. iA Writer also allows you to work locally, allowing you to add any folder on your file system — including those synced with DropBox or indeed any other file syncing service.
I’ve already noted the new hashtags feature. Hashtags also appear in the Library, providing convenient access to content you’ve tagged in this manner.
Smart folders
iA Writer 5 also introduces smart folders, which are analogous to Filters in Ulysses and Collections in Scrivener. They allow you to build groupings based on search and other criteria.
Creating smart folders is easy, and the feature is very powerful. You can add multiple conditions, chaining together searches, paths and modification dates to drill down into your content.
My one bone to pick here is there’s no support for regular expressions searching. This failing is also shared by Ulysses. Regex is a much more powerful pattern-matching search system that’s typically found in dedicated programmer’s editors. Given that iA Writer (and Ulysses to a less extent) make a claim as being more like text editors, I find its omission bothersome, and stupid. Scrivener has regex support, and regex searching is provided by the underlying macOS libraries. Regex is also critical to my editing workflow.
That said, I still think iA Writer’s Library in version 5 is a definite improvement over its predecessor. It’s done a lot to bridge the gap with Ulysses and may be the better choice for privacy advocates or those who deal also work with Windows, Android or Linux.
Export
Unfortunately, iA Writer’s export features continue to disappoint. When I switched the Ulysses, I retooled my blogging workflow to use TextBundle as my preferred delivery mechanism publishing content for my blog.
Ia Writer 5 2 2nd Edition
I dinged iA Writer 4 for not supporting TextBundle, and I’m disappointed to see there’s no support in version 5. Again they’ve chosen to push their own archival format which is fairly useless outside the iA Writer universe. TextBundle, by contrast, is widely supported among Mac and iOS apps.
iA Writer 5 makes significant improvements to MS Word export. It will export tables, images and even styles that Word and other compatible word processors will recognise — I tested it in Pages too, and the results are great. That’s terrific news for writers who rely on Word for collaboration or exchange — something I must do when working with my editor.
iA Writer 5 continues to support direct export to WordPress and Medium, something users of those platforms may find very useful for blogging. As noted though, I rely on my own publishing platform, and so I have no use for these features. That’s not to disparage iA — Ulysses also supports both platforms.
I was also disappointed with iA Writer 5’s PDF export, which out of the box is still bland compared to Ulysses — and bland is being generous. However, iA Writer allows you to add other templates or make your own using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Having looked at the GitHub project briefly, Writer's templating system is much more fully-featured than that of Ulysses. However its massively underutilised; compared to the Ulysses Style Exchange, iA Writer’s selection of community templates is positively anaemic. One must assume that iA Writer’s users don’t care about PDF export, or those that go to the trouble of creating themes don’t share them as readily as the Ulysses Community.
So, export is a mixed bag at best. Personally, I’d prefer to export or render documents using Marked App 2, or directly manipulate the raw markdown with the MultiMarkdown command-line app and PrinceXML. I will admit, there’s something incredibly appealing about this aspect of iA Writer’s openness that can’t be overlooked.
Conclusions
Ia Writer 5
iA Writer 5 is an excellent release that’s significantly improved the user experience over its predecessors. iA continues to deliver an incredible blend of features and aesthetics while staying true to their disciplined vision of creating a beautiful, and minimal place in which to write.
As before, I still don’t see iA Writer as a Scrivener competitor. It cannot touch Scrivener’s organisational power, nor its flexibility, or its unmatched export features.
![Ia writer 5 2 2nd grade Ia writer 5 2 2nd grade](https://ia.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/search.png)
On the other hand, iA Writer is a direct competitor to Ulysses, and to be honest, were it not for a couple of weakness in key areas (mostly export), I’d be sorely tempted to switch, because…
…iA Writer is probably the best app for technical writing in markdown I’ve ever used. The library, table support, full MultiMarkdown compatibility, syntax highlighting for grammar, the ability to include external files, a Library that can work transparently work with the host file system (and therefore Git), make iA Writer my number one choice for long-form technical content.
So, is it for me? Not for fiction, and not for blogging…but, for my technical writing, it’s almost perfect and I’m sorely tempted to buy the macOS version, for a few projects I have in mind.
Ia Writer 5 2 2nd Gen
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