My professional life has revolved around software development, from the early days of 3270 terminals connected to an IBM mainframe to the modern world of powerful clients, cloud based computing and everything in between. I’ve saved my favourite feature for last. My static site doesn’t benefit from this at all, but I’m tempted to try it for some simple Medium or WordPress blogging some time soon. The files that I write in one place are automatically available for me on all my other locations.Ī feature that I’ve not tried yet but which looks interesting is that iA Writer can publish drafts to many popular blog destinations - Ghost, Medium, WordPress, Micropub, and Micro.blog. It also works with Dropbox, One Drive, Google Drive and others. I use iCloud which has performed flawlessly for me. Happily iA Writer is able to synchronise with a number of data sync services. However, moving from Notes to markdown was annoying as I basically had to enter all my formatting all over again. I can use iCloud 1 to synchronise everywhereīefore I moved to using markdown for writing, I found that Apple Notes was an excellent choice for me - it supported headings, bold, italic and tables very nicely and since I’m in the Apple ecosystem it synchronised nicely between my phone, iPad and desktop - which made it easy to work on projects wherever I happened to be. I can provide locations and create Smart Folders which display documents according to a very customisable set of rules This makes it easy to organise my files in a number of ways. The organisational UI allows me to create folders and to add any arbitrary hashtags to files. While you are in preview mode you can choose which template you want to use for web view or pdf view of your document.įor reference I have found information about creating your own templates in this github repository. I’ve been very happy with the template I’m using at the moment. There are four templates which control the rendering that come with the software and it is apparently possible to create your own templates if you know HTML, CSS and JavaScript. When I use the syntax for links it uses subtle shading to remind me what I’ve done there.Īlso I can tap the preview button at any time and see it rendered as the final version will look. The main writing UI shows subtle effects - when I use ** for bold or * for italic, the relevant words are shown in bold and italic respectively. I don’t think it would suit my writing style. It is possible go into a super-minimal ‘focus mode’ but I’ve never tried that and so I can’t comment on it. The writing interface is minimal and that suits me just fine. If you want to read more about markdown, you can read up lots of details here It is a very clean UI, but it helps me organise well It can be handled, but it is honestly a little clunky! There is one big drawback with markdown, and that is that it doesn’t handle tables well (and sometimes it is important to include tabular information). I’m a touch typist, and the ability to easily apply formatting while I’m typing is a big draw too. The secret sauce is that it is easy to convert into proper semantic HTML, and so it is easy to go from my writing to posts on my website here (which is powered by the static site generator Hugo). Markdown is a plain text format that uses some sensible and easy to understand characters for formatting - when you read the plain text version it is easy to understand the structure of the document. Why is this my choice? Several reasons I like writing in markdown I’ve shifted over time from one to another, and at the moment my preferred choice is iA Writer. The choice of software for writing is as individual a choice as anyone is likely to make.
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