Apple & Technology : My Other Writing App
Oct. 2/26
I've been writing in iA Writer this week, which for me counts as a small rebellion. Ulysses is home — sync across the Mac Studio, the MacBook Pro, the iPad, all of it stitched together with Universal Control so I can start a sentence on one screen and finish it on another without noticing the seam. Ulysses is comfortable. iA Writer is what I picked this week because comfortable wasn't the question I was asking.
The question was simpler: what happens to your thinking when the screen is just words?
iA Writer doesn't give you much else to look at. No folder sidebar demanding a decision, no formatting toolbar suggesting you should be doing something to the text instead of making it. Open the app and there's a cursor and a blank field and whatever you were about to say. It's closer to a legal pad than a piece of software, and that's evidently the design intent — get out of the way and let the sentence happen.
I noticed the difference by Tuesday. Not in the writing itself, particularly — a flat sentence in iA Writer is still a flat sentence — but in how long I could sit with a half-formed thought before reaching for something to fix it. Ulysses, with its outline pane sitting there, tempts me to organize before I've finished discovering what I think. iA Writer doesn't offer that temptation. There's nothing to reorganize. You just have to keep writing until the thought is actually done, which turns out to be a different kind of work than I expected.
It reminded me of walking a field before you've decided what's wrong with it. Twenty-seven years of that taught me the same lesson from a different direction — you don't diagnose a crop from the truck window. You get out, you walk the rows, you let your eyes do the noticing before your head starts explaining. A tool that hands you too many options too early does the same thing a truck window does: it lets you form a conclusion before you've actually looked. iA Writer, by removing the options, made me look longer before I decided anything.
I won't pretend this is a permanent conversion. I'll be back in Ulysses next week, probably by Monday, because the sync across three screens is genuinely useful and I'm not interested in performing austerity for its own sake. Tools aren't virtues. A stripped-down app doesn't make you a better writer any more than a fancier tractor makes you a better farmer — it just changes what gets in your way, and sometimes that's worth knowing on its own. But the exercise was worth running once — draft a whole piece start to finish in an app that refuses to help you with anything except the sentence in front of you, and see what your thinking does when there's nowhere else for your eyes to go.
What I noticed is that the thinking slows down in a good way. Not sluggish — unhurried. The kind of slow where you're not stalling, you're just finally paying attention to the thing you're actually trying to say. Worth trying once this week yourself, if you've got a piece of writing you keep almost finishing. Open something plain. See what's still there when there's nothing else to look at.
From the Field:
Six Colors — sixcolors.com
Daring Fireball — daringfireball.net
Consumer Reports (Tech) — consumerreports.org
For deeper dives: MacSparky (paid membership) — macsparky.com
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