[oloolo]

Maybe you should actually try the app before you judge it. There are better and there are worse tools to work with, believe it or not.

Besides Burroughs there are literally hundreds of people that tried it and love it emphatically:

http://twitter.com/#!/iA/favorites

They're not all idiots.

[achompas]

I've seen your Twitter feed--it's full of accolades. Congrats on a great app release.

I'm not picking nits with Writer, though. My problem is with the family of "zen apps" that help writers "get in the zone," including yours.

If someone is frequently distracted when they write, they either (a) need to get away from the internet when writing, or (b) reevaluate whether they enjoy writing. It's like the programmer that can't decide between Emacs, Vim, TextEdit, or other IDEs. Stop making excuses, pick something, and work.

The fact that people will buy this app because it'll finally help them write without distraction just...bothers me. Maybe because I was there before. Anyway, don't take it personally--your app is selling like gangbusters, and it looks like a great user experience.

[oloolo]

1. Those programs exist because there is a need to get out of the mess that Word is. 2. Programmers do have amazing apps, writers don't. 3. Fullscreen is not the solution to absence of distraction. I can work perfectly distraction free in Firework without going fullscreen. Cross editing is the main sickness of digital writing.

The key is a predefined writing-optimized typography that justifies the absence of formatting (a massive distraction) and a sub-mode that gets rid of all the visual clutter when necessary. Some think that Focus mode is just a gadget. It's not. The noise that is similar to the signal is the most distracting.

[achompas]

Great response. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

How'd you come to the conclusion about writing-optimized typography? Is this something you considered using your background in IA, or user/beta testing, or what?

[oloolo]

Thanks. 1. I've been talking about reading typography for a long time and just got curious about what writing typography could be like. 2. Was always jealous of those amazing coding apps. 3. noticed that switching between writing in a small input field in the backend and reading in (a designed) preview mode on the frontend in WordPress improved my writing and just couldn't figure out why. 4. Secretly stalked people who wrote texts on computers at work, in cafés, and when visiting clients (online newspapers). Yeah and then (since I studied Philosophy) there was all this theoretical stuff (Barthes, see below) in the back of my head.