So, pretty much any paragraph literally just like this, particularly with lots of very bad adverbs, needless filler and worn out cliches will combine together to absolutely make iA Writer pounce on you like a bat out of hell. However, its job is to flag and strike out filler words, cliches, and redundancies. The checker operates similarly as the Syntax highlighter. The standout feature is the new Style Checker. New features in iA Writer 5.6 Style Checker Create a file in iA Writer, and you can edit it in whatever app or shell script you want. There's no vendor lock-in, no proprietary formats, no impenetrable database. iA Writer works with text, first and foremost, and text doesn't give a toss what you use. Scrivener as an equivalent feature called Linguist Focus, but iA Writer's is better as it allows multiple word types to be displayed at the same time. iA Writer can highlight nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions in different colours. The app flies, and if I'm honest, it's much more performant than MultiMarkdown Composer, which is pretty sluggish when documents get long and complicated. This makes iA Writer an excellent app for technical writing. It supports tables, definition lists, transclusion, and useful things that MMD doesn't, such as task lists, strikethrough and highlighted text. It's even smart enough to handle metadata. MMD is my preferred markdown flavour, and iA Writer supports it in full. Now I'll list what I like about iA Writer - much of which stands from my last review and hasn't changed in this release. No autosaving… seriously, what's up with that? Ulysses and Scrivener both save automatically.As a technical writer, I prefer an outliner to a preview panel any day. MultiMarkdown Composer has had the feature forever. Ulysses 20 made its outliner much more useful by putting it in the new dashboard. There's no outline view to break down and navigate longer documents by their headings.I will admit, however, that MMC is getting old and tired, and hasn't been updated in years. My markdown editing needs have thus far been met by MultiMarkdown Composer, which I bought before my first review of iA Writer.Same goes for inline formatting - I prefer the way Ulysses handles this when compared to iA Writer. iA Writer exposes footnotes, URLs and image links, while Ulysses hides them in a manner that pleases me. I accept that's a matter of personal taste. Ulysses lets me choose the fonts and colours I like. It's too opinionated in matters of style and typography for me to enjoy its writing experience.Yes, I could script the conversion of iA Writer's otherwise useless archive format, but why bother when Ulysses supports TextBundle out of the box? I've adopted TextBundle as my interchange format on which my blog is built. So, why not iA Writer over Ulysses? After all, iA Writer is much cheaper thanks to its one-off pricing model. Well, neither Ulysses nor iA Writer will ever unseat Scrivener as the undisputed master of long-form writing. What about Scrivener, you ask? iA Writer is occasionally touted as a Scrivener replacement. Why I don't use iA Writerīefore launching into the review, I feel I should state my reasons for not using iA Writer, even though there are lots of features I like.įor me, iA Writer's chief competitor is Ulysses - at least for my use case writing short-form articles for my blog. Given Ulysses has improved its grammar checker by partnering with LanguageTool, I reasoned it was time I gave iA Writer for macOS another look. One commenter noted the release of iA Writer 5.6 brings with it a style checker, building on the strength of the syntax highlighting feature I praised in my last review. To date, I've not used it much, which is why I haven't yet reviewed it. Since my last review, I've purchased the app on iOS to replace the unofficially dead Editorial by Ole Zorn. In fact, I enjoyed using the app, even though I concluded both times iA Writer wasn't ready for me. These reviews are among my most popular articles, and I enjoyed writing them. I've had a long, and flirtatious history with iA Writer, having reviewed it on two separate occasions. In the space of an hour, two readers commented on my blog espousing the virtues of iA Writer - one was posted in my Ulysses 20 review, the other in last year's iA Writer 5 review.
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