iA Blog

That is an excellent idea. It reminds me of iA Writer‘s author feature: https://ia.net/topics/ia-writer-7

Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder. The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago. 1. https://ia.net/writer

The company behind the minimalist writer is writer had a presenter app called iA Presenter. https://ia.net/presenter I’ve had it for a while and it’s awesome to write all the notes and stuff in markdown. They also provided a good amount of content on how to write good presentations. Looking at these two offerings the iA presenter tries to look great out of the box straight away versus this one where you have to mess with the layout. It helps you focus on the content. I’ve done a few presentations with iA presenter and it’s been well received — note I’m a good speaker but not a great slide maker.

There's also the closed-source iA Presenter[0], which makes some great-looking slides. It's paid and Mac-only though. I use Quarto with reveal.js and love it. I teach and particularly like the multiplex plugin[1] to sync the presentation on multiple devices. My students can open it on their laptops and I control the changing of the slides, but they can click on links or interact with the presentation themselves. [0] https://ia.net/presenter [1] https://revealjs.com/multiplex/

I have fallen in love with the opposite approach: IA Presenter [0] (no affiliation). It's just markdown and content. The rest is taken from you. 0 - https://ia.net/presenter

Ah, I hate that you were downvoted for that. For those who haven't used it, yes, iA Writer tries to steer you away from adverbs: https://ia.net/writer/support/basics/writing-tips/parts-of-speech You can turn that off. I did at first; all the colors in the English prose I was writing distracted me. I came to appreciate that, though. I realized that I used adverbs and adjectives much more than I intended to, and now they stand out. Along those lines, I've already realized that I overuse "great", "love", "hope", "literally", and "but". I added those to iA Writer's custom patterns, and now it pesters me when I use those words. Sometimes I mean to, but I literally love to put them in every sentence and hope it turns out great. iA Writer says, hey, you might want to reconsider your word choices.

I'm not sure if the name “Texture Healing” is descriptive enough (perhaps I'm not that much of a typography nerd I think I am!), but I love the idea. Basically it resolves pairs or triplets of monospace letters to make some of them wider when adjacent letter can be made narrower instead. Another variation on that theme are “duospace fonts”, like iA Writer Duo [1]. Those use two character widths instead of one (i.e. wide characters are always 1.5x wider than narrow). I think this could work for code, too. [1]: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

Try IAWritter DuoSpace: it’s a great mix between fixed width and proportional: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

I think iA has a insightful article "How Much Would You Charge for iA Presenter?" [1] about how to properly set the price between subscription / lifetime purchase pricing. [1]: https://ia.net/topics/how-much-would-you-charge-for-ia-presenter

On macOS, iOS I can recommend https://ia.net/writer. There's not really space to be ugly as it's very minimal.

Depending upon your motivation for monospace, the iA Writer site offers my current favourite: IA Writer Duospace. If you want monospace for the crisp, clear, draft-style, clutter-free look when writing code (or similar) then it's excellent. If you absolutely must have every character being exactly the same width then less so as the main difference is that it is monospace for everything except 'm', 'M', 'w', and 'W' which are each 1.5 wide (so it takes two to bring things back in alignment). In practice that is often less of an issue than it seems, and the benefit in readability/clarity/looks (literal mono for those characters makes them compressed) makes it worth giving it a try, even if you only end up using it for Markdown files etc. They have a web page explaining it (alongside a download): https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

I'm a big fan of typographically-driven design. One of the benefits is small file sizes and fewer network calls. Here are a few of my favourites, although they may be getting a little dated now: https://www.subtraction.com https://ia.net/writer http://webtypography.net http://paperbackauthor.com [1] --- [1] This one is actually for my own work-in-progress.

Half a year ago, I configured my IDE to use a _duospaced_ font: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font It mostly retains the advantages of a monospaced font while being a bit easier to read and fitting more characters on screen. I'd love to see more font-designers exploring this idea.

Due to the bugs in Apple Notes on macOS 10.15 and iOS 13, I just spent some time evaluating as many note taking apps for Mac as possible. I ended up picking https://ia.net/writer Typora was interesting but it was very buggy, and doesn't handle tags which are important for notes. My main criteria were an open file format, ideally editing plain text files on disk using Markdown as the formatting. This ruled out apps like OneNote, InkDrop, Standard Notes and others. If you don't mind about having a proprietary database so long as the data can be exported to Markdown, https://bear.app is my favourite so long as you're on an Apple device. I will also be interested in https://nvultra.com/ once it comes out of private beta. I published my full writeup today at https://davidmytton.blog/the-best-note-taking-apps-for-mac-markdown-op…

My favorite lately is iA Writer Mono: https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas

I love the typography of iA Writer: https://ia.net/writer It saves to plain text markdown files, but supports directory-based search etc.

If you are looking for cross-platform like MacOS, iOS, Android (I am not sure about Windows) then I recommend https://ia.net/writer/ It has apps for iOS and Android and app for MacOS. It is very fast (at least this is my experience) and supports sync with iCloud and Dropbox and Google Drive. I use only iClod and it works amazingly. I am using it for over 3 years I think. It just supports Markdown simple. You can choose your extension .md or .txt - depending on what you want to do next with your files.

One of the best markdown writers I have ever used is iA's Writer for Mac (and iOS) https://ia.net/writer/mac/ They have an Android version as well, but I have not used it.

I don't know about you, but I don't read a screen nearly as closely to my face as I read a book. If, for example, you normally read a screen at ~2x magazine distance, it stands to reason that screen type should be around ~2x bigger than magazine type, no? The best article I've seen on the subject is this one: http://ia.net/blog/100e2r/ And maybe follow-up with this one: http://ia.net/blog/responsive-typography-the-basics

[iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer) is a great one.

This is like https://ia.net/writer (my favorite).

I just had this light bulb moment about separating the writing and editing processes a few weeks ago. I am grad student and writing is an essential part of my job. I am not as good as I would like to be, but writing first and editing later removed a lot of mental load for me. I experimented with a couple of systems in the past, but always got paralyzed by my inner critic commenting on every sentence. It was exhausting to even produce "one page worth" of writing a day. I thought that as I was editing while writing, it would be of great quality, but it was usually of pretty bad quality. Last week I just connected a bluetooth keyboard to my phone, opened up my favorite writing app[1], and started typing while staring out of a window. I was dishing out page after page of moderate quality writing. I would then wait a day or two and edit it. It was far easier to convert the moderate quality stuff by removing the fluff than to try producing great quality writing directly as I did before. Appendix: Previous systems 1) Try writing perfect prose on the first try: This is paralyzing. I would just sit staring at my computer screen for hours, thinking of the perfect introduction and perfect sentences. I have since realized that this is bad for my mental health and productivity. 2) Write on paper: I then tried writing on paper. Got more done than just staring at the screen. It is difficult for me to write for extended periods of time like this. My hands start aching, and my handwriting…

Changing jobs in 2005 caused me to switch from taking notes on paper to doing it electronically. My new employer provided a tablet PC with a stylus running Windows and [OneNote](https://products.office.com/en-US/onenote). Taking notes on that system with excellent handwriting recognition was a revelation. The tablet was pretty clunky by today's standards, but it worked well. It was particularly useful for generating meeting notes in real time and projecting them during meetings. After moving to another employer, I no longer had access to such a tablet but used [TiddlyWiki](https://tiddlywiki.com) to keep my notes. It was great until the number of notes became large (in the thousands). After that, I became an early adopter of [Evernote](https://evernote.com). It was an adequate note-taking app, but the killer feature for me was searching for text in images. At that time, we put meeting notes up on a whiteboard. After the meeting, I could take a picture of the whiteboard, insert it in Evernote, and search it any time after that. I maintained a subscription to Evernote until the end of 2016 until they got squirrely about their subscriptions and some privacy issues. After several years absence, I went back to TiddlyWiki. It was very much improved. But after importing thousands of notes, it became too slow at editing. The search was on for another system. I looked at several open-source tools under active development: * [TreeSheets](http://strlen.com/treesheets/) has been…

iA Writer has Mono, Duo and Quattro fonts, with the latter two being almost monospaced. They concede some size variations for specific characters (Duo has 150% width characters, Quattro also uses 50% and 75% for narrow characters). It's a fun subtle adaptation to keep close to the typewriter-like experience of the app. https://ia.net/topics/a-typographic-christmas

"Slow the f*ck down." - Oliver Reichenstein [1] This only happens because the software industry has fallen into the Religion of Speed. I see it constantly: justified corner-cutting, rushing shit out the door, and always loading up another feature/project/whatever with absolutely zero self-awareness. AI is just an amplifier for bad behavior that was already causing chaos. What's not being said here but should be: discipline matters. It's part of being a professional and always precedes someone who can ship code that "just works." [1] https://ia.net/*

Wrong, the iA Writer thing was about Google Drive access, not local file access: https://ia.net/topics/our-android-app-is-frozen-in-carbonite

"Unfortunately Mistral-OCR has still the usual VLM curse: with challenging manuscripts, it hallucinates completely." My personal experience relates to the statement from the article, "According to several studies, approximately 80–90 percent of the world's organizational data is stored as unstructured data in documents, much of it locked away in formats that resist easy extraction." In my experience, this means Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents authored by people who put more focus on the appearance than the structure of the content. Take one of these documents and generate PDF from it and any hint of structure that existed is gone. There was an article on HN not too long ago discussing this history of Word documents and the lack of structure, but I can't find the link. ETA: https://ia.net/topics/markdown-and-the-slow-fade-of-the-formatting-fet…

Another factor: > Google also just increased the target API level requirement for apps on the Google Play Store https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/articles/google-plays-rules-killing-indi… We also saw established apps like iA Writer decide to get off the treadmill. > In order to allow our users to access their Google Drive on their phones we had to rewrite privacy statements, update documents, and pass a series of security checks, all while facing a barrage of new, ever-shifting requirements. https://ia.net/topics/our-android-app-is-frozen-in-carbonite?utm_sourc…

Their main product -- Windows and Mac platforms only: https://ia.net/writer Can't seem to find screenshots. Anyone used it?

What do you call the Apple store then if it's not a monopolization of the iOS ecosystem? This article accurately captures all tech monopolies, Apple included. https://ia.net/topics/monopolies-apple-and-epic