Earlier this year I had an eye condition that affected my ability to read text on a screen. What I briefly couldn’t live with is the inability to change the font size. And yet, the font is ugly and that is a subtle form of distraction. This is deliberate, in the name of simplicity and minimalism, admirable goals. You can’t change the iA Writer font, nor can you change the font size. Nothing illustrates this better than its inflexibility about the font it uses. However, much as I love iA Writer, it takes minimalism a step too far. MinimalistĪlthough Byword and iA Writer look different, they share a minimalist user interface that means nothing gets between you and your words. And both can save text documents in popular formats like. Both can produce plain text documents readable on any device. You can sync documents across your Mac, iPhone and iPad using iCloud with both apps. Both are text editors optimised for writers not coders.
#Byword review portable
Even so-called portable typewriters were anything but portable by today’s standards.īyword shares much with iA Writer.
Editing was a pain, usually involving a red pen and white-out. Of course typewriters couldn’t store documents. They didn’t offer scope for unproductive fannying about. Typewriters made for productive writing because of their simplicity. iA Writer and my iPad are like a typewriter.
#Byword review manual
Typewriter-like, in a good wayīyword is the nearest thing to using a manual typewriter that I’ve found to date. Good text editors, like Byword, do one thing, manipulate text, but they do it well and stay out of your face. A word processor’s power comes from its relative complexity. Unlike Byword it’s not great for writing.Ī text editor’s power comes from its relative simplicity. Even now I tinker with HTML, PHP and CSS using TextWrangler. I wrote my first HTML pages using a text editor. In fact, that’s what many of them are used for.
#Byword review code
You can write programming code in a text editor. It’s true, text editors also do many things that go beyond writing. They usually create plain text (.txt) files - although that’s not the whole story. In general they are not concerned with fonts, layouts, creating tables and so on.
Text editors do little more than manage strings of letters, numbers and other characters. How text editors differ from word processors Let’s face it, with all that other stuff going on, it’s easy to be distracted. This means the apps are complex and bloated.
Most word processors do countless things that go beyond writing. Microsoft Word does mail merge and tracks changes. As a result word processor developers threw the writing baby out with the bath water.Īpple’s Pages word processor is good at document layout. That’s important because while word processors are useful, they have moved beyond their original intention. The key to Byword and the reason it is ideal for focusing on words is that it is not a word processor: it’s a text editor. There are versions for OS X ( US$12.99 in the Mac app store) and iOS ( US$4.99 in the iTunes app store). Byword is the ideal Mac writing tool if you just want to focus on words.
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