This month I’ve been blogging like a champ, every day. Not from WordPress admin though – I’m a markdown lover and I prefer dedicated apps.
I’ve been experiementing with 3 apps in particular this month; Byword, MarkDrop, and the one I’ve used the longest; iAWriter. In this post I’ll review each and give my verdict on my favourite solution overall.
Appearance
All apps strive to give a distraction free writing environment. iA Writer and Byword have a similar appearance, with a plain window for writing only. MarkDrop has a split pane so you can preview as you type which I like.
All three show word count and character count in the footer which is pretty useful.
Customisation wise, MarkDrop and Byword let you choose light or dark, and Byword has font options. iA Writer doens’t have this – not neccessarily a bad thing though because the default theme/font is nice to use.
MarkDrop wins for the clean UI and split preview.
Winner: MarkDrop
Features
iA Writer and Byword both have a ‘focus mode’ whereby the current paragraph is emphasised (other’s fade). This is useful if you want to focus on the paragraph you are currnetly writing. MarkDrop lacks a focus mode.
Byword also alternativly lets you focus on lines as well, and has something called ‘typewriter mode’ which keeps the line you are writing centered.
Other than that, the features are pretty standard. Simple editors, with previews and various export options.
Winners: Byword and iA Writer
Saving & Syncing
Both Byword and iA Writer save to iCloud which is what I like to see – having my docs in the cloud where I can pick them up from anywhere is a great benefit. MarkDrop however only saves to Droplr – the idea being to make it easy to share documents. As I’m not a Droplr user, and don’t need to share my documents, I didn’t play around with this and just saved locally (boo).
Winners: Byword and iA Writer
Mobile apps
MarkDrop doesn’t have an iPad app, but Byword and iA Writer do. Both have iCloud integration letting you continue editing on the go.
The iA Writer iPad app works very similar to the Mac app. It has some shortcodes when writing allowing you to insert commonly used characters and move the cursor or a single space or by word. It also has focus mode like on the mac.
Byword for the iPad is also fab, and although it doesn’t seem to have focus mode, I found the keyboard shortcuts much more useful, giving you quick shortcuts to make headings, links, images, lists and tabs, and also cursor controls. The keyboard shortcuts are more compact compared to iA Writer giving you more space to write.
Byword has the edge for ease of writing.
Winner: Byword
Exporting & Publishing
Starting with the weakest, MarkDrop lets you export as a PDF or HTML. There are no options to ‘copy’ HTML. I personally would have liked to see this as its faster to get content from the App to WordPress. Instead you have to export HTML then get the contents and put it in WordPress.
iA Writer has several export options; HTML, RTF, Docx, and lets you ‘copy html’ to the clipboard. Byword has pretty much the same, which is good.
Byword does appear to have the advantage though; as a 2.99 in-app purchase, Byword has some extra publishing tools for publishing directly to WordPress and other services:
When you are ready, you can publish straight to your blog (or just copy it across as a draft). I found this quite convenient, a lot more so than MarkDrop which doesn’t even have a ‘copy html’ option like iA Writer does.
Winner: Byword
Pricing
The Mac versions are similary priced, MarkDrop being the cheapest.
1. £6.99 iA Writer + £2.99 iPad version
2. £6.99 Byword + £2.99 publishing addon + £2.99 iPad version
3. £5.49 MarkDrop (no iPad version)
Conclusion
Overall, although I prefered the look and feel of MarkDrop, iA Writer and Byword were far superior when it came to usage. Byword had to edge when it came to exporting and publishing features too, making it the winner, with iA Writer second.
As a long time user of iA Writer, I’m happy to be moving to Byword from now on.
Champion: Byword
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