I bought Writings during its most recent $0.99 sale because I’m a complete sucker for note-taking and writing apps. Unfortunately, after having spent a week with the app, it looks like I’ll still be doing most of my writing(s) elsewhere.
Amazing Dropbox Sync, but no Search
One of the best things that Writings has going for it is its incredibly powerful Dropbox sync. Not only can you sync entire folders with workspaces within Writings, but you can have each workspace sync with a different folder. Writings doesn’t do sub-folder sync, though, so you’ll have to add each nested folder manually.
The only things missing for me here are options to auto-sync and the ability to search through the files that I’ve synced over. The former may be a technical issue, but the latter seems a little silly not to include. I may not necessarily need full content search within an app meant for sitting down and pumping out words, but I’d love to, at the very least, be able to search for files by title.
Bells and Whistles
Writings can be the kind of app that leaves you alone with just letters and a cursor on a page, but it can also be one of the bells-iest and whistle-iest writing apps out there. There are options to switch between dark and light themes, change font and font sizes, and even fiddle with page margins.
But for all of those extra little features, there are two things that keep me from loving Writings: the specialized keyboard and the app icon.
The optional extended keyboard is a great idea, but I think it misses the mark since it really only provides one new function (soft tabs) and mainly provides shortcuts for keys that are easy enough for me to find in the first place. Writings does allow you to tap in the margins to move the cursor through your text, and it’s that kind of functionality that I would have preferred to see more of in the keyboard, instead of one-tap apostrophes and quotation marks (which the iPad has shortcuts for anyway).
Then there’s the matter of the icon, which I think tries to capture too much. I believe that it tries to stay minimal by depicting a pen and a piece of paper on a desk by a window on a sunny day, but just by the length of my description just now, you can probably tell that it feels like a little much. Even if I am reading too much into the imagery of Writings’ icon, I just find the colour scheme a little off-putting, and since I like to keep my writing apps right on my dock, Writings just won’t do.
Conclusion
I don’t actually dislike Writings because it has a lot of great things going for it: powerful and robust syncing, an interesting documents display, and a customizable UI that’s as clean or as cluttered as you want it to be. However, I simply don’t have any reason to use Writings over iA Writer and PlainText at this time, and unless the icon undergoes some sort of change, this isn’t an app I’ll be keeping on any of my home screens.
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Writings was bought by the author for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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