Think Critical

Alright. You got me. I’m going to try to write a double review for the next app to return to my home screen. Actually it’s a single review with bonus app, I suppose.

Ever since the app came out, I’ve used iA Writer for almost every single post on this site. It’s quiet, minimalist, simple: all buzzwords when it comes to design—especially iOS or Mac design. With Dropbox syncing, it almost becomes the perfect writing tool for the iPad and iPhone, but not quite.

I use Markdown. At the most basic level, it allows me to write in a text editor anywhere, then copy it with formatting intact to Tumblr (or any CMS that supports it). But I could do that with HTML, right? Sure, but have you ever tried to read HTML? It’s not pretty, and it’s not pleasant. Markdown is designed to be easily readable.

With that in mind, iA Writer’s support for Markdown is fine as it’s a simple text editor and any text editor can write in Markdown by design. What you can’t do in Writer is preview your writing with the Markdown converted to HTML. Do my links work? Did I get that bold word or italic phrase? And so on.

Enter Byword which does many of the same things that Writer does (like Dropbox sync), including the best feature of both.  Above the keyboard in each app, there’s an additional row of keys for commonly accessed characters and navigation. Byword has up, down, left, right for character placement while Writer has single character left-right and one word at a time. Writer has access to smart quotes, colons, and semicolons (useful for quickly punctuating your writing) while Byword has parentheses and square brackets (very useful for Markdown). 

So they are two pretty evenly featured writing apps, but which one makes the home screen and why? Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the win goes to Byword. It has Markdown preview, a clean design, and Markdown focused bonus keys. iA Writer is great, but in the end, its slavish dedication to minimalism sacrifices usability in the way I write on iOS.

The great news is that both are universal apps, and both are fantastically priced. iA Writer is $0.99, and Byword is $2.99. At those rates, it’s worth it to try both to see what you like best.

A couple of months ago, I went into the Apple store with a question about my iPhone screen. The genius helping me asked if I would demonstrate the problem I was having, so I did using an app that gets more screen time than just about any other on either my iPhone or iPad. The app was Instapaper.

Now I thought that just about everybody with an iOS device knew about this app and the network service which goes along with it. I was wrong. The guy looked at me, eyebrows furrowed, head tilted slightly.

“Instapaper. What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

Rightly or wrongly, I gave up on him being able to fix my problem (he didn’t fix it). It was unbelievable to me that an Apple store genius working with iPhones would have never seen Instapaper before. For better or worse (or unrelated) he hadn’t.

Fast-forward to today and Instapaper is still one of my most used apps, and if you could somehow log the amount of time an app spends onscreen, Instapaper would most certainly win. Why? Let’s assume, like that wayward Apple genius, you’ve never heard of it before.

Instapaper is a service which allows you to save articles for reading later. In the app, all the clutter, flashing ads, comment streams, suggested stories, they’re gone. It’s just you and the article on the device of your choice (even Android now). For many, this is a problem that you don’t even know needs to be solved until you try it. Once you start saving, and reading, articles, suddenly the quality of content on the Internet seems to rise.

Often, Instapaper is called a modern magazine. You decide which articles are in the magazine (content related images included), and you decide when to read them (even when you don’t have an Internet connection). If you don’t like the default font, there are several excellent print-quality font choices to make the text more readable or appropriate for the type of articles you like to save.

I’m going to keep this short, because there are so many clever features in this app that I’m still discovering them even after using it consistently for two years. The fifth app to be returned to my home screen after the purge is Instapaper.

Get the universal app for your iPhone and iPad on the AppStore for $3.99, it’s worth every penny.