You may be wondering why people even need to choose between writing apps. Every note-taking app is essentially a writing app, right?
Well, in this postmodern world, nothing is quite as simple anymore. If you’re someone like me who types your thoughts away on the daily or earns through writing, you may benefit from investing in one of these apps. Trust me; it’ll make your work a lot easier.
Here are a few of our go-to writing apps. All of them come with a cloud sync feature as well. You can thank me later…
Scrivener
Scrivener is a great option for serious writers. If you want a more efficient way of organizing your book or thesis, this seems like the way to go. It has received glowing testimonials from best-selling writers who have composed several major books using the app. It comes packed with every feature imaginable, and more. But that is also what’s holding it back. Although the app lets you customize everything, it can be quite a drag to deal with all the icons and options it provides.
iA Writer
Simplicity is the hallmark of iA Writer, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have any advanced features. The app has quite a few of those including Syntax Control which shows you the structure of your writing, highlights adjectives, nouns, conjunctions, and more. The app’s Focus Mode is another neat little feature designed to keep you from getting distracted. It creates a fantastic experience of fixed-line scrolling, just like a typewriter. Like the other apps on this list, iA Writer also lets you publish to blogs, in this case, WordPress and Medium.
Ulysses
Ulysses is quite similar to iA Writer but has two significant differences. While Ulysses is a subscription model that only works on iOS and Mac, iA Writer works on other platforms and is a one time purchase. Apart from the Syntax control feature, Ulysses can do everything iA Writer can. And if you use other third-party checkers, then you don’t really need the Syntax feature anyway. Both of these apps focus on optimizing the writing experience. Like iA, Ulysses stays minimal although most of its features are well thought out, customizable, and the toolkit is complete.
Bear
A relative newcomer, the Bear app seems like a real contender. It provides a great deal of flexibility for handling text, is easy-to-use and customizable, the inline tags are the same as in iA Writer and are quite useful for organizing large documents. The app supports a custom version of Markdown, offers basic tools, a variety of themes and even gives you exporting options if you subscribe to a modest monthly plan of approximately 111 INR.
If you love writing and want it to stay that way, it won’t hurt to look for ways to make the process more enjoyable. And finding an app that makes you fall in love with writing every time you pick it up will definitely be a major help. Ulysses is my personal favourite on this list. I prefer my writing apps to be attractive, simple, but with a few bells and whistles that allow me to make it my own.
However, if you’re perfectly happy working on your device’s built-in word processors, that’s fine too. More power to you!