It's not feasible for most folks to do their everyday work on an iPad yet, but writers seem to be one of the quickest growing groups to attempt it. It makes sense: the act of writing doesn't require that many technical resources outside of a way to input text, a way to research, and a way to save your work. In that sense, using an iPad when it's time to sit down and write can be pretty easy (for some of us, anyway). But which app to use?
This is a question that the staff at Infinite Loop find ourselves being asked often. And admittedly, it's not always an easy question to answer, because writers have different needs based on what they're writing, who they're writing for, and what they plan to do with it after they're done. I happen to know a lot of different kinds of writers, from gadget bloggers to food writers to sci-fi authors, so I held an informal poll to find out which apps they like the best. From there, I chose the four most commonly mentioned and tried them out.
So, hold on to your butts and read on for our mini-showdown between four popular writing apps on the iPad:
iA Writer ($0.99)
iA Writer for iPad (there is a separate version for iPhone) was hands-down the most-mentioned writing app when I asked for suggestions from my friends, Twitter, and even several other Ars writers. The reason became clear when I began using the app: it manages to pull off being a full-featured app with numerous bells and whistles, and a simple-looking app that doesn't come with many distractions. And for only 99¢, it's certainly priced well against the $4-5 competition.
What are those features, exactly? For one, you can store your work on your iPad, iCloud, or Dropbox—using iCloud can sync your documents seamlessly with the Mac desktop version of iA Writer (available on the Mac App Store for $8.99), but using Dropbox can sync your documents anywhere for free (or whatever price you're paying for your massive Dropbox account). The diversity of the options is nice, because it allows you to save your work to wherever's most comfortable for you, or you have the option of just storing it on the iPad and mailing it to yourself, printing, or copying/pasting to something else.
iA Writer supports plain text and Markdown (if you're into that sort of thing), but there's no Markdown preview, so that may be a deal-breaker for some. There's apparently no HTML support either—at least I couldn't find a way to export my writing as HTML, meaning that if that's the kind of output I want, I'll have to write it in plaintext. That's fine and all, but there are other apps that will convert it for me. As such, this is an extra step that I'd rather avoid, and the same applies to Markdown. Some sort of clipboard export option that supports HTML would be nice to have for writers looking to save a piece to somewhere on the Web via the iPad (without exporting it to Dropbox and then accessing it from a computer).
WriteRoom ($4.99)
WriteRoom has long been a popular writing app on the Mac, but it turns out that it's popular on the iPad as well. Known for its distraction-free workspace, WriteRoom has a button (lower right corner) that lets you get rid of the other UI elements so you can focus entirely on your writing. But most of the other apps I looked at also had this feature—save for Writing Kit, which I discuss below—so this can no longer be WriteRoom's main selling point (though WriteRoom does tout the fact that it has "true" fullscreen support, sans status bar). So what else does it offer?
For one, WriteRoom was the only app that allowed me to create folders within the app in order to organize my writing. I write for Ars, but I also write for my personal blog and sometimes I even write things for a mythical book that I always tell people I'm not writing. So I don't always want to have all of my writing in one place; folders help keep things separate.
Like iA Writer, WriteRoom allows you to save documents to the iPad's own internal storage or to Dropbox, but there's not yet any support for iCloud (its FAQ says that "iCloud support is under consideration.") That would be beneficial for the reasons outlined above—being able to sync documents over iCloud with the Mac version would be great. For my purposes, Dropbox is just dandy, and the implementation works well.
WriteRoom technically only supports plaintext when composing, though it can open files that are designated as Markdown or HTML if you save them as such in Dropbox. You can't automatically export your writing in these formats, though, nor is there an easy way to copy the entire thing to clipboard as there are in other apps. (You can select all and copy/paste using the iOS copy/paste behaviors, but it requires more steps.)
One thing I do like about WriteRoom is the ability to set a passcode upon launch of the app. If you're the private type, not wanting nosy people digging through your work, this is a huge plus. I don't like the idea of a friend or family member picking up my iPad to play a game, and ending up filtering through my writings without my knowledge. To our knowledge, this is the only app of the bunch that offers such a feature.
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