Writer Pro: patently amateurish

Minimalist software with illusions of grandeur

I really liked iA Writer. Not for what it did (it’s essentially a bare bones text editing app) but more for what it didn’t do: much. It is by not doing much that it achieves its greatest strengths: it loads fast, it isn’t distracting, and it prevents the tweak-settings-to-perfection procrastination sinkhole.

iA chief, Oliver Reichenstein, didn’t miss an opportunity to wax poetically about his minimalist brainchild, touting every small UX decision as the result of copious research (which, If I had to guess, amounted to a few napkins worth of prototype sketches). Reading him, you’d think iA Writer was the best thing to ever happen to software: an exquisite experience, uniquely tailored to the needs of the modern writer, the software equivalent of that Fallingwater house by Frank Lloyd Wright. Actually it is just one of many nearly identical minimalist text editors. There is Byword, Writedown, Texts, Machiatto, Ulyssess III, Mou, Editorial, Elements, Plain Text, and quite a few others. I know because I’ve tried most and I still use several — despite being samey, they still have a couple of different strengths each.