iA Writer for iPhone

It's pretty barebones, as expected. I love the typeface, too. It's the same Nitti Light that looks so great on the iPad version of iA Writer.

I'm not too sure about the bar above the keyboard. It includes common punctuation — a hyphen, colon, question mark, period, and apostrophe.  It's there to keep you from having to access the secondary keyboard for punctuation. I'm trying to use it, but it doesn't stick for me. I activate the secondary keyboard and hit the punctuation needed without thinking. I don't need to hunt for the period or comma. My fingers know exactly where they are. I don't need a new way of writing punctuation. I'd rather have the additional line of screen space.

Speaking of additional screen space — just flick the keyboard down and off the screen. It hides easily, giving you tons of screen space. The ( few) options do appear at the top of the screen when you do this. You can email or copy the text, or print¹. You can also create a new document, or switch documents.

Really, though... I'm not sure I would change anything else. The app is simply beautiful, and the iCloud syncing is both as simple as possible and flawless. I've been a fan of Simplenote for a long time, and that's quite easy to set up. But this? There is no set up. Open the app and write. Pick up where you left off on your iPad. It could not possibly be any simpler.

Markdown

No fancy Markdown converting or text manipulation here. In a way that's a real shame, since I write exclusively in Markdown. But it's also not the end of the world. When it's time to convert from Markdown to HTML, there are a hundred different ways to handle that.

The Verdict

iA Writer will not become my primary writing app. I'm too firmly attached to nvALT and Simplenote. That said, I've already written several pieces in iA Writer. The typeface is really, really great. It probably shouldn't matter, but it does.