There are already a thousand and one reviews of iA Writer on the App Store and on the web, so this won’t be one of those. This is simply a quick post to highlight one really awesome feature of the app, while lamenting a strange design decision that I very much hope iA will reconsider. Writer’s […]
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Why iA Writer for iPad is Unbeatable and Unreasonable

Jun 7th 2011 by

There are already a thousand and one reviews of iA Writer on the App Store and on the web, so this won’t be one of those. This is simply a quick post to highlight one really awesome feature of the app, while lamenting a strange design decision that I very much hope iA will reconsider.

Writer’s font and its on-screen keyboard are great, but it’s really the use of white space in iA Writer that kicks the most ass. With Focus mode turned on, not only do you benefit from the selective graying out of all-but-three lines, but you get a *lot* of white space below your insertion point that never goes away. Insert a line break and all of your text will flow up, leaving the same gigantic bottom margin. I could say something about how the great white expanse helps me to clear up and crystallize my thoughts, but the fact of the matter is simply that the large margin helps keep the text at a comfortable spot on the top half of the iPad, meaning that I don’t have to crane my neck and look down to the bottom of the screen. This is such a simple and considerate move on the developers’ part, and it’s probably the biggest reason I love this app so much on my iPad.

That brings me to the most disappointing part of Writer: the way it locks you into syncing a “Writer” folder with Dropbox. I don’t need Writer to be anything it doesn’t want to be, so I understand why there isn’t complex sub-folder support or full text search, but why lock your adoring users into using yet another Dropbox folder? Wouldn’t it have been simpler for the end user to allow them to specify a Dropbox folder to sync with? If iA was worried about slowing down the app when users sync with large folders, wouldn’t a warning or a hard limit to display the last last 10-50 files you’ve edited? As it is, I’ve actually moved all of my notes as sub-folder into the Writer folder so that I can view finished drafts in PlainText or Notesy, but I just wanted to let the developers know that I was grumbling (and possibly even pouting) while all of those files were transferring.

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