Finally got around to copying over all my Ulysses documents to iA Writer. It’s been two or so years since Ulysses was transitioned to a subscription model and I immediately made the switch to iA Writer. I’m still very glad I did. Moving all my remaining documents over today reminded me of one of the other good reasons: Ulysses kept it’s documents in an iCloud database as opposed to actual files. Rather than selecting them all and moving them at once I had to go into each one and export it or copy paste. Yuck.
By contrast, all my iA Writer documents are actually .txt files. So much better!
I used to use iA Writer but started using Apple Notes. What advantages does iA Writer have in your view over Notes?
Ah, good question! I use iA Writer for two things. Podcast transcripts and writing blog posts. The podcast transcripts can be 40 to 60 pages long and so that’s a bit much to type into Notes though I suppose it would work. But I output it to html and pdf for the client. With iA Writer exporting from Markdown to those two formats is super easy. For blogging purposes, iA Writer is also a good way to go. It’s possible now to use Notes with a shortcut to hand-off to WordPress but iA Writer has it built in and allows for adding in categories, keywords. I think if I were not doing the podcast transcripts I would perhaps just use Notes as my writing/blogging app. It’s a great app and has come so far in recent versions. It’s also one of my most used apps. Nice to have such great default apps. I really like Reminders too and it’s gotten quite a bit better with iPadOs.