Writing apps rated
The very best word processors for your Mac
Some writers prize the beauty of the writing environment; others, the speed of the search engine
Writers can be a picky bunch. Some have special pens; others demand a particular kind of notebook or a certain writing location. And on Macs, writers definitely have their favourite apps.
Like pens and places, those favourites differ from person to person. Some prize the beauty of the writing environment; others, the speed of the search engine. Some want to use the same app for scripts, scribbles and shopping lists; others want an app that focuses purely on paid-for projects.
There is one thing many can agree on, though, and that’s Markdown. Markdown was
created by John Gruber, aka Daring Fireball, and it’s designed to make it really easy to create structured text without sacrificing readability. That structure makes it easy to output the same document in multiple formats, something that writing app developers were quick to notice: if you create a document using Markdown you can then output it to pretty much any format you like. That’s really handy for those who write for multiple platforms: you don’t need to use one app for blogging, another for creating Word documents and yet another for making ePub files or PDFs.
The five apps we’ve tested here all enable you to export in multiple formats, but they differ in almost every other respect. For example Bear is fun, friendly and instantly accessible, while Scrivener’s many powers take a bit of time to learn. iA Writer and Byword get out of your way so you can focus on your words, while Ulysses enables you to tweak all kinds of things to get your environment just-so. They’re very different from one another, but they all have one thing in common: they can make life easier for all kinds of writers.