My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Write! App | A Review

Write! App
https://writeapp.co/
I was approached to try out a new app called Write! and I'm here to share my findings on it after using it. It's a cool app. Simple and sleek yet powerful. They got my attention in their email with the idea that it's a distraction-free writing app. I'm all about that. The app has a bunch of great features too. My preferred app for writing first drafts for years has been Notepad because it's literally just the text on the screen. No squiggly lines when you misspell a word. It's just you and the text and that's what I prefer. By the way, in this Write! app you can go to Tools > Turn Spellchecker Off and you get the notepad-like experience I love. All that editing stuff is for after you finish the first draft. This app can look almost as bare bones as that, and it's a great app for writing in and I really like the user experience after writing with it for a while. Let me tell you what I like about it. 

First off, all my stuff gets saved to the cloud. This is a big one for me, and one of the main reasons I moved from using Notepad to another software that's similar but saves to the cloud automatically. If my hardware dies I don't have to worry about losing any of my work. I love this feature! It gives me peace of mind. It also allows me to get to my documents from anywhere.

One feature I found, while digging around in the settings, is Enable Typing Sounds. I thought this was super cool with headphones on. Every time you hit a key you can hear either Mechanical or Typewriter sounds. Both sounded pretty cool and made me feel a little like I was typing on a typewriter or one of those great old computer keyboards that were a lot louder and required you to push down more on the keys. I still love typing on those old keyboards. Nothing can beat the sound. It brings me back to writing when I was young.

It's easy to have multiple projects open at the same time and switch between them with the tabs. This is really great for me when I'm doing things like glancing at my story outline document while writing the first draft of my novel. Other writing apps don't always make it so easy to switch between projects. The tabs feature is great.

If you want to change your user interface they make it super easy. Hate writing with black text on a white background? Use their "Switch to Dark Theme" feature to change it all to white text on a gray background with the click of a button. I'm used to writing with black text on a white background, but after trying the Dark Theme I couldn't go back to the Light Theme. It almost hurt. The Dark Theme is much easier on your eyes.

Have a deadline? You can set daily goals and track productivity stats. You can publish documents from the app to share with others. There's also a whole bunch of preset text styles to give you the look you're after. I've found that using a font I like while writing actually changes the experience for me so I think this is a cool feature.

Last but not least there's a feature unlike one I've seen before called focus mode. This fades out all the paragraphs except for the one you're working on. Don't knock it until you've tried it. It goes one step further in helping you have a distraction-free writing environment. It almost guides your eyes to the paragraph you're writing and makes the rest of the UI fade out of your attention. It's pretty cool.

Check out this awesome writing app here: https://writeapp.co/

2 comments:

  1. Hey!

    For any writer, it is important to write peacefully. With so many distractions, I guess Write! app is surely going to help me. Thanks for the share! A good post on an app indeed.

    Regards
    Life saver essays

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    Replies
    1. Thank you! It is a great writing environment. I hope it helps you. :)

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