But if you like iA Writer’s approach and attractive styling, you’ll find it to be a great tool to write without distractions.
If you don’t like what’s here, you should look elsewhere. In fact, that’s one of iA Writer’s hallmarks, love it or hate it: Little in the app is customizable. You also get a decent Markdown-preview window, though it’s not customizable. The app offers a formatting bar at the bottom of the window that lets you quickly apply Markdown formatting, even if you don’t remember which syntax characters to use. IA Writer’s Markdown support is very good. (I’d prefer it if Focus Mode highlighted the current paragraph rather than sentence, since many writers think in terms of paragraphs, but the app’s sentence-level focus seems to be popular.) iA Writer is a minimal, yet powerful writing app. The app also includes a Focus Mode that restricts the view even further, letting you concentrate on a single sentence at a time.
While it doesn’t let you choose your own typeface, the company’s Nitti is a beautiful mono-space font, and working in iA Writer lets you ignore everything around its document view-I often use iA Writer’s full-screen mode to block out the other windows on my Mac. Information Architects’s $5 iA Writer wins hands down for simplicity and for its attractive (and only) font. (Note for this feature to be useful, the apps must use a common sync platform such as iCloud or Dropbox.)
(Since OS X lets you create a PDF from any file, as long as a writing app has a mode or view that shows your text with proper formatting, the app doesn’t need a specific PDF-export feature of its own.)
A full-screen mode, so you can shut out everything else on your Mac’s screen.A distraction-free environment-or at least a special view or mode-that allows you to focus on your writing without worrying about toolbars, palettes and other formatting tools.Today’s best focused-writing apps are made with writers in mind and offer some or all of the following features: