“Everything goes away except for the writing experience” —Stephen Fry, about iA Writer
A conversation on Twitter in 2009 with the founder of Information Architects (iA) sparked a collaboration on a “Writing Machine.” I prototyped and reinvented interfaces for text entry on desktop computers, tablets, and smart phones. In 2010 we released iA Writer, a word processor designed to single-mindedly focus on writing. The video shows the features and interactions.
Custom interfaces and interactions were challenging to achieve on embedded devices due to hard- and software limitations, but resulted in many of the innovative features such as the text entry in Focus Mode, Reading Time indication, or the custom Keyboard Extension. Another big engineering effort went into the Cloud syncing engine that powers the writing workflow across multiple devices.
iA Writer appeared regularly in Apple’s “Editor Choices” and “Best App of the Year” category. With over 1,000,000 copies sold, it has helped students, journalists, and bestselling authors to find more pleasure in working with text. Beyond my direct contributions, in 2011 Writer was introduced on the Mac and in 2014, Writer Pro gave birth to many of the original prototypes such as smart syntax control.
iA Writer was the first large-scale consumer product I’ve built and it added an important perspective to my previous experience in enterprise software and research projects. Furthermore, it is satisfying to use one’s own tools, creating an important feedback loop for improvements. My first writing project using iA Writer was a booklet about working in Tokyo for my friends and family.
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