![]() There's also equally nothing in Writer "Pro" (attaching Pro to the end of a consumer product seems to be all the rage these days) that seems even remotely more useful than the previous iteration. There's nothing that I saw in iA that I couldn't get with more functionality with vim or SublimeText and some LaTeX, syntax analysis, and Markdown plugins. ![]() It's the ones that look "beautiful" in Apple parlance – overly simplistic, bare, and stripped-down, with nice icons and good marketing. What I've found is that it's not the best-designed apps that sell the most on the App Store. What dedicated writer is actually so adrift in the English language that they need a simple, boneheaded machine to hold their hand through the most delicate and important part of their workflow? But to bring this feature to market-indeed, to make it the centerpiece of your pitch? You have to ask what segment of the target audience would benefit. I don't blame software developers for continuing to try. The ability to load in vocabulary lists for what you think are parts of speech, like the ability to count word and sentence length (less so, frankly), is like the ability to detail a car with a sledgehammer.Įditing prose is a matter of taste and thus a very, very difficult problem to solve programmatically. The problem is the same as the readability scores: the level of insight that an ordinary, untrained, consumer-level word processor can bring to bear on written English is completely trivial compared to the needs of any writer. So now there's a tool that highlights parts of speech. This feature stuck around for ages (it's still there, I presume) despite the niggling persistent truth that for any given text written for and by fluent English speakers, increasing its 'readability' only made it more stilted, patronizing, and sort of. Writing and word processing apps have been touting this kind of thing for a long time-15 years ago it was Flesch-Kincaid scoring. But what professional writer on earth would find any value in this feature that they're so proud of, SYNTAX CONTROL™? This isn't a knock on iA Writer specifically. But it will be hard for writers that love iA Writer and those looking for a great writing tool not to drool.I really like the workflow concept and I hope it works well. It’s priced at $20 on the Mac and $20 on iOS. Watch the head of Information Architects explain how Writer Pro was made: As you type, you can see the reading time, number of sentences, words, and character count for your document. There’s iCloud sync to keep documents up to date between the Mac and iOS versions. Writer Pro automatically formats Markdown syntax as you write, which is great for writers who deal with HTML. Syntax Control currently supports English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. IA Writer had a “Focus” feature that blurred out everything but the sentence you were currently writing, and Syntax control is a natural extension of that with much more to offer. No more redundancy and saying the same things twice! The killer feature is “Syntax Control,” a tool that scans your text and breaks it down into its different elements, like nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions. If you write often, this allows you to see and correct words or phrases you often repeat. Each one serves its own purpose and comes with its own, custom-made font. The app is broken down into four different modes: Note, Write, Edit, and Read.
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