7 Writing Apps That Are Fighting For My Attention

If you are like me, than you are writing application junkie. I have all sorts of apps that I am using in different case scenarios and I love them all. Each and every one of them has a different purpose.

Evernote (OS X and iOS)
Scrivener (OS X and Windows)
Pages (OS X and iOS)
Byword (OS X and iOS)
Day one (OS X and iOS)
Drafts app (iPhone only)
nvALT (Download link)

Evernote

Evernote officially died as my writing app. Other applications simply obliterated it with speed and comfort of writing. It’s clunky iOS apps are moving me further and further away from it. In the world where mobile and speed are the game changers, Evernote is simply a memory dump. Chances are I will find something there, but I won’t be looking there unless I have to.

I still love and I still will use Evernote for reference collection, but it’s days as task manager are long gone, and it’s day as a content creation platform is also on it’s dying breath. The way I actually use Evernote changed completely. Since it’s still the best and most powerful web clipper tool, I will use it to store my research. All t he research data that I gather are going into the next mentioned application that I am yet to master…

Scrivener

Scrivener I have yet to discover, it is supposed to be my book writing application with all the awesome stuff hiding inside of it’s box. It also introduced Multi MarkDown writing language. Guy from BetterMess.com explained it rather well, you should check his article out. Scrivener is introduced to me by Timothy Ferris and if a book writing legend is the same person endorsing it.

Pages

My fascination with word processors started when I first got my hands on Pages on OS X. The revelation started when I’ve used full screen mode for the first time. It felt like I’m using a blank piece of paper. I love the way Pages feel and look, almost makes me want to write in it, instantaneously. To me it was an intense feeling of artistic inspiration. My thoughts and a blank piece of sheet. Than I would set the virtual piece of paper, from empty, to word filled meaningful artwork. That in an of itself was enough to set me on fire. It still does.

Pages do however have a big purpose as being absolutely the best full featured text editor on the OS X. Nothing matches it, so if you want to finish your Scrivener work, your last destination will be Pages.

You won’t be doing a lot of typing in it, but you sure will do a lot of editing, styles, formatting, pagination. At that moment you will know how powerful Pages really is. It’s just gold if you stumble upon some air print device. Imagine doing all your work at home on a computer and you need that printed. You just bring your phone and your fully edited document from a desktop app, resides on your phone and can be printed wirelessly. Totally worth of 20$ + 10$ investment!

Byword

That is why I got Byword, while I was waiting for iCloud sync, I wanted to have something that will keep me cowered, everywhere. Simple text editor, that supports markdown. Markdown is a way for you to write in html without really knowing html.

Day One

It was amazing self reflective experience. That I will go trough in further detail in one of the next articles. With Day One I feel like I have my personal private Twitter. I just wrote an in depth review of it, if you are into journaling you gotta check it out and see wether it’s for you or not.

Drafts App

And the last app, that I absolutely fell in love with and is a huge game changer for me is Drafts app. It allows you to write, take notes and instantly share them with numerous different services, other apps and social networks. The amount of apps supported is insane. Usually numerous ideas get captured in Drafts and then are off sent to the platforms where they should reside, wether they are tweet or article heading.

nvALT

Sorry, I almost forgot, the golden nugget, one that completely changed my iPad usage. The app in which I am editing and publishing this article. Only words of praise for Blogsy, the magnificent blogging client for the iPad, which is properly integrated into your writing and publishing workflow. Blogsy like nvALT and ByWord have complete support of markdown.

Conclusion

Wether you think that all these apps are an overkill or not, I exactly know what goes where. When you are conisstently pushing out 5-1p pages a day, a system needs to exist in order for me to know what I actually made and what is next for the publishing. In the next couple of days I will explain you how my writing flow looks like with most of these mentioned applications. Bookmark this article and check it in next 30 or so days, you will see a lot of new improvements.