iA Writer for iPhone and iPad review

Text Entry View as shown on itunes store

Last week I saw iA Writer On the features screen in the app list on my iPhone. I had a nose to see what it was about and decided maybe I should look into writing apps to write my blog with. I read the reviews of iA Writer as well as some of the other top rated writing apps. They all seemed very similar and all had generally good reviews with a few complaints.
Now it's important I mention at this point that I'm very new to writing in a simple stripped down environment. Previously I've just written straight to the blog site either via my PC or an iOS app for the blog. And those apps do work quite well it has to be said.
So coming back about iA Writer. After reading the reviews and way up the options, I decided to go with iA Writer. The two factors it came down to were price at the time of purchase (iA Writer on sale at 69p for the multi platform app) and the fact that the biggest iA Writer criticism stemmed from the iPhone app not being as good as its iPad and Mac counterparts. I'm writing this review on the iPhone version for convenience but if I were sitting on the sofa or sitting up on bed I'd most likely be using the iPad.
The main differences between the phone a tablet version are the lack of focus mode in the phone version, which is were the app darkens out all about the last couple of lines of text to minimise distraction, and the keyboard layout. There are more of the shortcuts along the top of the keyboard in the iPad version than in the iPhone and they are quite useful.

iPad display shot as shown on itunes store

Unlike some other users, I've had no speed issues with syncing between devises via iCloud or Dropbox. Maybe if you have a novel to sync it will take longer but for my blogs so far it's been more than speedy enough. The only niggle I have with the syncing is on dropbox. If you don't manually hit the little disk icon on the bar at the top before exiting the app or letting your phone auto lock, you lose you work which I find really annoying as it happened a couple of times. Once earlier today on my iPad when I lot my wifi connection (it's a wifi only tablet) and had to exit the app to reistablish the connection. I've written to the devs about this and now start off writing everything on iCloud which does auto save as you go. I then move to to Dropbox when complete in case I want to access from my PC as I'm not a Mac user and they don't have a PC version of the app :(
Those are the only issues I've experienced and read about so far.
So moving onto the writing experience. It's great, I wonder why oh why didn't I write this way before. It really does help concentrate and the writing job at hand when you have a really stripped down simple writing app in front of you. I now understand why book writers use program's like notepad to work. That's essentially what iA Writer is doing, it's taking away the options and fancy looks, whistles, bangs special fx’s and replacing them with minimalist elegance. And the aforementioned extra row on the keyboard. That row adds and helpful left and right arrow to move your curser for editing, hyphen, comma, colon, question mark, full stop and apostrophe.
I've now switched over to writing on the iPad version to list the extra buttons it adds with the larger screen space and keyboard. Here you also get a speach mark button, open close bracket button and two more buttons to move the curser for editing in addition to the arrows for next word/previous word, making it even quicker to skip back and correct a typo.
So to summarise, I don't know why I didn’t look into better ways to write before but I can definitely say that using iA Write makes writing my blogs a far more enjoyable experience than before. And as a result of getting iA Writer, I'm now considering writing a novel, it's always been on my ”someday” todo list but now it's an active project for me that I'm currently researching. While its at 69p on the app store I think it's an absolute steal and a must have app to make any kind of writing a better experience.

4.5/5 for me.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad