What you need to know

• Ulysses 19 is now rolling out in the App Store
• Adds full mouse and trackpad support on iPad
• Lets you add keywords to Markdown files, material sheets, and more

Ulysses, a popular text editor for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, has received a significant new update to Ulysses 19. A lot is going on in version 19, starting with the addition of mouse and trackpad support on the iPad.

But there's a lot in Ulysses 19 that impacts the app across platforms, so let's dive right in.

Mouse and trackpad support

If you're using a trackpad or mouse with your iPad, say on the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, you'll be delighted with this update. The cursor snaps to controls, two-finger swipes on the trackpad smoothly open and close the library and attachment menus, too.

Having been able to test it out prior to launch, I can tell you that this support feels excellent and is right at home on the iPad, especially if you're used to using Ulysses on a Mac, where these sorts of gestures have been available forever.

Material sheets

The rest of Ulysses updates are available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

First, we have an intriguing aspect of the update. You can now mark certain documents, generally scratch notes, research material, and other extraneous bits of writing that shouldn't be part of your final text, as "material."

Sheets marked as material won't be a part of your final document. If you set goals for a particular group, any material sheets that you mark as such won't be counted towards those goals, either, at least by default. So if you plan to export a multi-document folder into which you've put a report and all related research, mark the extraneous bits as material, and they won't show up in your exported PDF.

Say, for instance, you're writing a book. You don't want all of your chapters to be in a single document, so naturally, you split them up into multiple sheets inside a folder for your book. When the time comes to export everything you've written, the export preview includes all of your chapter sheets as part of a single export.

If you had any additional sheets full of research material, those would also be included in that export unless you either deleted them or moved them out of the folder. Now, though, you can mark sheets as material, and any sheets marked as such won't be included in that final export document, nor will they count towards any goals you had for the folder.

Markdown file keywords

Ulysses has long had a keyword system, which lets you better organize your work. For instance, if I wanted to be able to find all of the articles that I've written about the Shortcuts app, I'd add a 'Shortcuts' keyword to the sidebar of the document.

Previously, you could only use keywords in native Ulysses documents. But in Ulysses 19, you can now use them with Markdown (.md) files. When you want to add a keyword to a Markdown file, add a '#' followed — without a space — by your keyword. When you go to export as Markdown, your keywords will appear at the bottom of the document.

If you export a Markdown file with keywords to another app, like Bear or iA Writer, those apps will recognize your keywords as keywords and organize those documents appropriately.

Everything else

There are a few other notable additions to Ulysses with version 19. You can now add external folders from the Files app directly into Ulysses on iPhone and iPad, such as from a cloud storage provider of your choice or a GitHub client, and edit the files in those folders in Ulysses. There's also the option to import or export backups of your text library.

There are also new filtering options for things like whether something has goals, or you can sift through your available material sheets.

Ulysses 20 beta program

Hot on the heels of this version 19 release, the Ulysses development team is opening registration for the beta program for the next major revision of the app, Ulysses 20. You can sign up to join the program on the Ulysses website, though remember that signing up isn't a guarantee. While the developers are tight-lipped on just what's in store for Ulysses 20, they do say that they're working on "a few awesome new features that need thorough testing," so if you have any interest, go ahead and sign right up.

Get the app

Ulysses 19 is available as a free download on the App Stores for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, though there is a subscription ($4.99 per month, $39.99 per year) to unlock the app for all of your devices after a free trial.

Journaling is something that we should all be doing, as it helps us keep a record of what happens in our daily lives. It's a record of memories, both good and bad, and a way for us to relive those special moments.

Back in the days before digital journaling was possible, we probably kept paper notebooks around for our journaling needs. While nothing quite beats that feeling of ink flowing into the pulp of some high quality paper, it's hard to find exactly what you're looking for if you don't keep a system in check. Plus, your memories are only in one place, and if you lose it, well, you're screwed.

Digital journaling is significantly better than the old paper-and-pen method, and Day One is the best app to handle your digital journaling needs. But if you're new to Day One, it can seem a bit overwhelming at first. Fortunately, as someone who's been using Day One for years, I'm here to help you get the most out of it!

• What are you using Day One for?
• Customize your journal
• Organize with tags
• Make use of photo imports
• Add locations and steps to entries

What are you using Day One for?

Before you start to dive into Day One, it's important to consider what you're going to be using the app for. There are many uses for Day One:

• Regular journal to keep all your thoughts
• Photo journal
• Travel journal
• Gratitude journal
• Dream journal
• Health and Fitness log
• Food diary
• Productivity journal
• Work log
• Record and thoughts on books, movies, etc.

As you can see, the possible use cases for Day One are pretty much endless. If you want to keep a record of something, then you can turn it into a journal in Day One. It's flexible and completely customizable to fit your needs.

However, you'll need to be aware of a few things if you're interested in using Day One for multiple journals. There are three levels of Day One accounts: Basic, Plus, and Premium.

Basic is free but limits you to one journal, one photo per entry, unlimited entries, local backup only, exporting, book printing, and Activity Feed on iOS.

Plus is a grandfathered plan only available to Day One 2.0 users between February 4, 2016 and June 27, 2017. Plus includes up to 10 journals, 10 photos per entry, unlimited entries, unlimited syncing through Day One Sync, optional end-to-end encryption, IFTTT integration, and everything else that Basic includes. Users on Plus level do get a discount on Premium, making it $24.99 a year.

Premium lets you get the most bang for your buck, and it runs at $34.99 a year. With Premium, you get unlimited journals, up to 30 photos per entry, the Mac app, unlimited syncing, end-to-end encryption, discounts on book printing, and everything else with Plus.

With these factors in mind, think about how you want to use Day One. If you're fine with just one main journal to keep all of your thoughts and memories in, and limited to just one photo per entry, then Basic should be enough. But if you want more flexibility and better organization for your journals, then consider getting Premium.

I'm a Premium user and I couldn't be happier. I have 10 journals going so far, with my main "Journal" getting the most use with 1950+ entries and 1700+ photos. My main journal holds all of my photos of special events that I want to remember and relive, and I've even got tags for certain people and things, such as my fiancé, holidays, family, and more.

My other nine journals include: a seldom-used dream journal, links to published works I'm proud of and want to remember, extremely personal thoughts relating to family matters, and automated feeds from my social media accounts.

Personally, I've found the ability to keep multiple journals in one place incredibly handy, and it's changed the way I journal for life.

Customize your journal

Whether you're using one main journal or a dozen, Day One has several options for you to customize the app to make it your own.

For one, each journal you create can have its own name and color, so they're all color-coded. Keep in mind that some hues are Premium only, so it's a bonus to having a Premium account.

There's also other omnipresent settings that you're able to change regarding Day One's appearance. These include 15 stylish fonts and various sizes, turning the first line into the entry title, linking Twitter @names, showing maps in the reading view, and even including your step count.

If you have a Plus or Premium account, the Activity Feed is a great feature to utilize. When you view it, you're able to quickly create new entries based on your activities from the past six weeks from photos, calendars, location history, and social media accounts.

Other advanced settings that you're able to enable include notification reminders to help you maintain a regular journaling schedule, or even remind you of past events.

There are a lot of settings in Day One that let you create the perfectly tailored journaling experience to suit your needs.

Organize with tags

As you start to accumulate entries in your journals, going back and finding an entry you want to relive can be difficult. This is why tags are so incredibly important in keeping everything organized and helping you find what you want.

When you create or edit journal entries, there's a button on the keyboard extension that has a tag icon. Tapping on this brings up your tags, and you're able to create new tags just by typing them in and then click "Next" on the keyboard.

Tags are available for just the current journal, or you can go through tags across all of your journals. The tag popup also displays your most used tags in descending order, and even searches for existing tags as you type one in.

I have grown a mostly organic collection of tags throughout my years of using Day One. I like to use tags for the name of my significant other, family, friends, special events, locations, and whatever else I may need to reference later on. My automated feeds with IFTTT and the like are automatically tagged, making it a bit more chaotic (thousands of tweets and Foursquare Swarm updates), but at least I know that it's tagged and put away without any input from me.

Make use of photo imports

While the traditional form of journaling is basically just writing down your thoughts, one should take advantage of the fact that Day One stores photographic memories too.

When it comes to remembering my time in Day One, I prefer attaching images whenever I can. It helps me see a visual for the day I'm talking about, and whatever memories it brought into my life. That's why I love how Day One chooses to implement adding photos, with a big button on the main view (the other just being a plain entry) when you launch the app.

As you use Day One's photo importer tool, you can see your entire Photo Library, or pick and choose from specific albums. At the bottom it tells you how many more photos you're allowed, depending on your Day One account type.

The best thing when importing photos is the fact that Day One automatically detects any EXIF data on your photos and asks you if you want to use the photo's date and time for your entry, instead of making it to be the present time. I've always found this useful because I often forget to add photos from special events the day of, so adding it later is not a problem since Day One gets the time info.

Day One provides a photo section where you can view every photo that you imported into the app. I enjoy scrolling through this to see all of the great times I've had, even those that may seem insignificant.

Add locations and steps to entries

Another thing that Day One excels at is making sure you remember where you've been in all of your entries. While you may not want your location revealed on social media or other forums that are public, I think a private journal that can be securely encrypted is different.

Each entry can have a location attached to it, and Day One pulls this info from Foursquare, Apple, or you can save frequently visited locales. If you're using the photo importer, the EXIF data should also provide location for you.

Once an entry has location added to it, you can check out where you've been on the Map view. I particularly like this because I've always found it interesting to see all the points you've been to on a map. It's the bigger picture, if you will, and you're able to see where you frequently write or log memories from.

Plus, if you include location on journal entries, you'll also be able to see how the weather was at that particular time as well. Did the weather affect your mood or plans? Having this information available to you is a great way to reflect.

For those who love to keep track of their steps for the day, Day One is able to log this information too. Depending on the time you input for the entry, Day One fetches your step count for that time and adds it in. Just like location and weather, it's another good piece of data to think about as you record your events for the day.

Record your life

Journaling is a great way to keep a daily record of your life, no matter what happens. It may seem a bit insignificant at times, but when you look back at these past moments in the future, you'll be grateful that you did.

Day One is the best journaling app that I've come across, and it's an app that has helped me keep track of all of my best (and worst) moments. It may seem a bit daunting at first, but when you're armed with this guide, Day One becomes an invaluable tool.

Free - Download Now

It's not often that I'm tickled by a new piece of software. I see a ton of really thoughtfully designed applications that are great at what they do and that, once I'm done writing about them, are immediately deleted from my Mac.

Highland 2 is not one of those apps.

Highland 2 is created by Quote-Unquote Apps, a company helmed by John August, the screenplay writer behind the movies Big Fish, The Corpse Bride, the latest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and several other films.

The Original Highland app, which was released a few years ago, was designed for writing screenplays using Fountain, which is an adaptation of John Gruber's Markdown text-to-HTML conversion tool created specifically for writing scripts.

The original Highland was good and capable, but limited. It was never an app I used day-to-day. Instead, I only pulled it out when I wanted to write dialog or needed to import a script for editing that I only had in PDF format.

Highland 2, on the other hand, is indispensable. I use it for everything I write, from short stories, to stage plays, to the review you're reading right now.

All Text All the Time

Highland 2 is, at heart, a text editor, which is a beautiful thing, because, unlike word processing applications such as Word and Pages and screenplay writing applications like Final Draft, your documents don't use a proprietary format that can only be read by the application it was created with. Highland 2 documents are text. Plain text that can be read by any text editor, which means your work should be readable well beyond the zombie apocalypse and recoverable by Martian invaders when they take over what's left of the world.

Text formatting is handled using the two aforementioned formatting tools: Markdown for formal documents and Fountain for scripts. But you don't necessarily need to know any of the syntax for either of them in order to properly format a Highland 2 document. Command-I, Command-B, and Command-U, work exactly as expected. There are keyboard shortcuts for creating links and a handy Markdown cheat sheet if you want to use Markdown's more complex features.

Likewise, Highland 2 is super smart when it comes to writing scripts. Begin a paragraph with INT. or EXT. and Highland 2 knows you're creating a scene header. Use ALL CAPS for a name and it knows you're creating a character cue. Text you type in the paragraph following a character cue is dialogue. Additionally, as you type character names, Highland 2 retains those names and will auto-complete those names when you type them again. And, just like Markdown, there's a Fountain cheat sheet you can use when your Fountain needs lean to something more than the basic.

In both cases, your PDF and printed documents are perfectly formatted and ready for use.

Try Before You Buy

Highland 2 is a free download from the Mac App Store that is fully functional, but which has some limitations. The Basic version, which you can use forever, offers the following:

• One Fountain screenplay template
• One Markdown treatment template
• One plain text template
• One light text editing theme
• One dark text editing theme
• Printed documents and PDF exports are watermarked

The full version of Highland 2, is $50 ($30 during release week) and offers:

• Four Fountain templates
• Nine Markdown templates
• Ten text editing templates (5 each dark/light)
• No PDF watermarks
• Priority tech support from within the app

Tools Galore

Highland 2 offers several tools to help you make the most of your writing. The app's sidebar has five tabs for navigating, working with, and creating notes in your documents. The first is the Navigator, which you use to see and quickly jump to all the sections, headers, images, files, and links in your text. The next is the Bin, which is where you can drag and drop text snippets that don't work in your document now, but that you don't want to delete entirely. The third is for Goals and Stats. Here you can view document statistics and set word and page count goals for a document. The fourth, Assets, displays a list of all the images and files imported into your document, and the last is a Scratch Pad where you can type quick notes and ideas outside the document body.

The app's editing window, which you can customize using Highland 2's Preference menu, also offers two buttons that let you quickly switch between editing and print preview modes. Buttons at the upper right of the editing window let you quickly switch between Markdown and Fountain templates for your document, change the editing window theme, and initiate a Write Sprint, which is a great way to get words down on the page in a limited period of time. (Note: Keep your eye on John August's Twitter account (@johnaugust) where he occasionally kicks off Twitter-wide Write Sprints.)

Bechdel Quest

If you're writing short stories, novels, stage plays, teleplays, and screenplays you're likely aware of the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which gives you an informal way of looking at your work and seeing whether the women in your fiction are more than shadows of real women. Highland 2's Gender Analysis tool can't examine your script to see if it meet's the Bechdel standard:

1. At least 2 women,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man

making sure your women talk about something other than dudes is up to you, but it does give you the ability to evaluate a script to see how many lines and words each of your characters speak and is organized by gender. It will help you discover how many scenes you give your female characters alone, how much dialog you're giving them, and see how many scenes you have where two or more women interact with each other.

The Final Draft

I said it at the beginning and I'll say it again here. Highland 2 is an indispensable part of my writing process. It provides excellent tools for every type of writing I do. It's thoughtfully designed, simple to use, never gets in the way, offers a host of Markdown and Fountain text editing features, and, if words are what you want to spend your time working on, you won't find a better app for getting your writing done than Highland 2.

Is Highland 2 for you?

Are you a Markdown master? Friend of Fountain? What's your go-to text editor? Are you ready to give Highland a try again?

Preview, the all-purpose image editing and viewing app that comes with macOS, is a perfectly serviceable tool for performing basic editing of PDF files. Using Preview you can add signatures, markup text, add comments, insert notes, crop images, and create stickies, but it's limited. There's no optical character recognition (OCR), some fillable forms don't work as well as they should, and you can't create fillable forms of your own, or edit text, other than performing basic redactions. For performing those kinds of tasks you need something more capable.

SmileOnMyMac's PDFPenPro 10 ($125) is just such a tool. It's designed to make PDF documents, which, by design, are difficult and even impractical to edit, as fluid and easy to make changes to as any word processing and page layout document.

What's new

PDFPenPro 10 includes about ten new features, among which are batch OCR, document watermarking, header and footer editing, better image resizing and editing tools, and better tools for selecting and creating line art and text.

The app's batch OCR recognition is as easy as you'd hope it would be. Drag a pile of PDF files to an OCR Files window, click an Perform OCR button and you're off the races. You can go about your business, including editing other PDF files, and PDFPenPro will continue to perform OCR on your files in the background.

OCR has always been a bit of a sticky wicket, but PDFPen does the job well and in almost no time. The app was able to recognize text in hundreds of pages of documents in a few short moments, making them searchable, editable, and correctable.

Once the text was recognized, I was able to export files as a Word document. These exported documents, to my surprise, were mostly usable. They PDFPen Pro properly recognized paragraphs and sentences and the document text flowed appropriately from one line to the next. It wasn't perfect, there were odd section breaks in parts of documents, particularly around graphics, but it wasn't the hot mess that OCR'd PDF files usually become when you convert them to Word.

There's no way you can edit that

As it happens, at nearly the same time I was asked to review PDFPenPro, I was also asked if I could edit a PDF document for a local theatre company I work with. The original InDesign document used to create the file was lost on a damaged hard drive. I honestly thought I'd have to recreate the document from scratch until I tried using PDFPenPro's new Precision Edit Tool, which made it possible to select, remove, resize, and edit graphics and text that were intermingled with each other.

This tool was like magic and made fixing the document a delight. It turned an expected hours-long process into about 30 minutes of work.

Forms fields and full web pages

PDFPenPro has a few features that have been around for awhile that are worth a mention here.

A Form field recognition tool scans your PDFs to see if there are any spaces on a page that are meant for users to add information to. When found, PDFPenPro adds a form field to that location where a user can click and enter text.

This tool found fields on both simple pages with obvious text entry fields and in more challenging documents, such as a real estate lease. While PDFPenPro didn't always find every field in a document or occasionally found fields where there were none, overall mistakes were rare. And where it made mistakes, the apps editing tools made quick work of adding and removing fields.

PDFPenPro can also take any URL and turn it into a PDF document, complete with images and clickable links. This feature worked less well than I would have liked, often rendering buttons as text with URLs that ran off the page or which were too large. Oddly, this feature worked worse on SmileOnMyMac's website than it did on iMore.com and other sites.

Once again, it's possible to resolve some of these web page rendering issues using PDFPen Pro's excellent editing tools, but any present this feature seems like more miss than hit.

Bottom Line

Overall, PDFPenPro 10 is an excellent tool for editing PDF files. Solid OCR, a powerful new Precision Edit Tool, and features that give you better control over everything in a PDF file make PDFPenPro 10 the obvious choice if your need better PDF editing tools than what' built into Preview.

Have PDF Problems?

Do you have a PDF pain point? What tools have you found that that help you turn PDF pain into PDF pleasure? Let me know in the comments below.

Scrivener is arguably one of the best, and certainly one of the most popular Mac writing app for serious writers. It's bursting at the seams with dozens of tools to help get you started, keep you on track, and finalize your work. Whether you're writing a screenplay, manuscript, or just want to practice your writing skills, Scrivener has everything you need from creating your first ideas to preparing for publication. This is a comprehensive guide to getting started with and using some of the more advanced features of Scrivener for Mac.

• $44.99 - Download now

What is Scrivener?

Maybe you've heard your writer friends talk about it. Maybe you've searched for the perfect writing app and Scrivener keeps popping up. Maybe you've landed on this page by accident and now you're intrigued. Scrivener is the Swiss Army Knife of writing apps and its available for Mac.

Scrivener: An Intro to the Mac's best writing app

How to get started with Scrivener

OK, so you've jumped, both feet first, into Scrivener (or maybe you're just trying it out with the free trial period), but you don't even know where to start. Don't worry. You're not alone. It's a big program with a lot of tools and features. Take a deep breath, relax, and read this.

How to get started with Scrivener for Mac

How to write a screenplay in Scrivener

As I mentioned before (a few times), Scrivener has a lot of writing tools. One of them is a nicely designed screenplay template that includes such things as a virtual corkboard so you can workshop your ideas, scene instructions, and more. Not everyone knows how to layout a screenplay, but Scrivener makes it so you don't have to know. You can just start writing and let the tools do the work for you.

How to write a screenplay in Scrivener for Mac

How to compile your manuscript in Scrivener

So you've done the writing and even went through a second or third draft, and everything seems good. Your book is done. But, there is still one last bit of work to do, and that's to compile everything into one, cohesive work of art that you can send off to your agent to get some feedback. Luckily, You don't really have to do much to finalize your project. Scrivener does it for you with a dedicated compile tool, designed for whatever type of project you're working on.

How to compile your manuscript in Scrivener for Mac

Best advanced features of Scrivener

Scrivener has so many features that its user manual is nearly 850 pages long. That's a lot of stuff to learn. It's almost a guarantee that you won't become an expert at everything Scrivener can do. You can, however, learn about some of the most useful advanced tools and add them to your arsenal of tricks.

Best advanced features in Scrivener for Mac

Need more help?

If you're still trying to figure out the basics, or want to get into a specific feature more, put your request in the comments and I'll make sure that we cover your topic and add it to this guide.

You've counted words, checked spelling and grammar, and eradicated typos. Congratulations! There's just one more hurdle to clear: the Compile box. Follow these steps to produce a finished product with minimal grumbling and/or cursing.

Step 1: Finesse your formatting

When compiling, Scrivener 3 applies preset formatting to different categories of folders and documents. It's worth your time to check that your manuscript has the right ones selected.

In any document, go to the Inspector, and click on the tag-shaped icon to bring up the Metadata pane. You'll see a pulldown menu for Section Type. Each project template includes appropriate section types.

The default, "Structure-Based," means Scrivener's taking its best guess about how to categorize this part of your project. You can manually change this by choosing an option below it.

To set a new category for entire groups of files in your documents — i.e., make every folder a Chapter — go to the Edit… option at the bottom of the menu. In the window that appears, choose the Default Types by Structure tab. Here, you can make sure that Scrivener will treat the folders and documents in your project the way you want.

Select an item in the "Document Type & Outline Level" column. (Click the + button at the bottom of the list if you want to add a new sublevel below it.) Then use the pulldown in the "Section Type" column to assign it a category. Scrivener conveniently highlights all the files in your document that fall into that category.

Step 2: Tell Scrivener what you want to create

Once you've made sure your files have the right categories, open the Compile box via File > Compile, opt-cmd-E, or this button in the top button bar:

Start with the "Compile for:" pulldown at the very top:

The options in the Formats column change, depending on what you choose here. Besides print, PDF, or various text and word processing files, you can export to Final Draft or Fountain for screenplays, or ePub or Kindle for ebooks. If you choose the latter, Scrivener will point you to Amazon's site for a free Kindlegen app to create authentic Kindle-ready files.

Step 3: Choose how it'll look and what should go in it

Each item in the Formats column comes with its own default set of Section Layouts in the middle column.

Want to create your own format? Click the plus button at the bottom of the format column, if you dare. (Keep the manual handy, because doing so gets complicated, fast.)

To pick a new font for your entire book, use the Font pulldown at the top of Section Layouts column. To see different options for how each part of the book will look, click the Assign Section Layouts button at the bottom. Here's where your work in Step 1 pays off.

In the resulting window, you'll see a list of Section Types on the left, and options for how each should look on the right.

Play around with different options until you find the formatting you like best. At the bottom of every list, you'll find As-Is, in case you like your work exactly how you've already formatted it. Click OK when you're done.

The third, catchall column has four panes. First, under the list icon, choose which parts of your manuscript you want to compile.

The "Compile:" pulldown menu lets you compile only what's in a specific folder — handy if, like me, you keep different drafts of a book in their own folders.

If you check "Treat compile group as complete manuscript," you'll have the option to add front and back matter from anywhere else in your project. (Nice, but not essential.)

Then scroll through the list of files, uncheck any you don't want to be included and make sure each selected file has the right section type.

The tag icon lets you specify a title, author name, subject, and keywords for your work. The options under the gear icon strip out pesky editing artifacts like footnotes, comments, or annotations. And the ab -> ac icon mass-replaces words and phrases for those last-minute character-name changes.

All set? Hit the Compile button. Scrivener works fairly quickly, so if your finished product doesn't look quite right, go back, tinker, and Compile again until it satisfies you.

Happy Scrivening!

Scrivener can do even more than the basics covered here, but with any luck, you've learned enough to start exploring on your own. Whatever you write, Scrivener can make the painstaking process of producing prose a little more fun.

Got questions we didn't cover? Favorite features we omitted? Let us know in the comments below.

True, Scrivener's designed to stay out of your way when you write. But the many other abilities squeezed into its every nook and cranny aren't there for show.

Consult Scrivener's 842-page(!) manual or its somewhat less lengthy interactive tutorial for the full lowdown, if you dare. Here, I'll share a few of the favorite features I've found while poking around the app's more remote corners.

Distraction destruction

My favorite of Scrivener's less publicized features hides in plain sight on the right side of the icon bar.

Full screen composition mode, also invoked via option-cmd-F, banishes Scrivener's somewhat busy interface and everything else on your screen. In its place, you see only soothing white text on a black backdrop.

… and, OK, a list of options if you move your mouse down to the bottom of the screen. Apparently, Scrivener just can't resist. But they're good, useful options, including ways to specify where your text appears on the screen, how wide its column is, and how much of your screen the backdrop conceals. A quick navigation menu lets you jump to other documents without leaving composition mode.

If white-on-black just doesn't work for you, you can personalize the colors and appearance of this mode under Preferences > Appearance > Composition Mode. And if you find you write best against a backdrop of fluffy kittens, images of your loved ones, or a picture of Idris Elba in a tuxedo, you can specify your own background image under Project > Project Settings > Background Images.

Goal tender

I previously mentioned how to set word count goals for an individual document. But if you have an overarching aim — say, if you're trying to hit National Novel Writing Month's 50,000-word finish line — go to Project > Show Project Targets, or hit shift-cmd-T, to open Project Targets.

Here you can not only set word count targets for your total manuscript (or the latest draft you've squirreled away in a subfolder), but also for your current writing session. (Note the Twitter button, a one-click way to brag to the Internet about your victory over writers' block.) Click the Options button to give yourself a deadline to meet those ambitions, and to specify when the session count resets, among other tweaks.

For even more precise analysis of your progress, check out Project > Statistics for word, sentence, paragraph, and page counts, and much more. Or consult Project > Writing History to track your productivity over time.

Drama-rama

We've discussed Screenplay mode, but Scrivener doesn't stop there. It includes script templates for comic books, documentaries, stage plays, and even BBC radio and TV dramas, for you Anglophiles. Look for them under the Scriptwriting category in Project Templates when you're starting a new project.

Inspiration generation

The Edit > Writing Tools menu contains Linguistic Focus, which grays out every part of your writing except the specified part of speech or type of text. This helps you discern whether you're leaning too heavily on adverbs, or zero in on your dialogue to make sure it rings true.

In the same section, you'll find Scrivener's ludicrously well-stocked name generator, with lists of popular names from various global cultures and whimsical options such as "attempt alliteration" or "double-barreled surnames."

Type! Type like the wind!

You now know more than enough about Scrivener to actually, you know, write something. When you're done doing that, come back for the final part in this series, where you'll learn how to put together your finished product and send it out into the world.

We've discussed how to use Scrivener for short stories or novels. But the program's many templates also include a fairly sturdy screenplay mode. If you've ever wanted to write a movie, Scrivener's automatic formatting and other useful tools can help. It's not quite a replacement for Final Draft, the industry standard — but then, Scrivener doesn't carry Final Draft's $200 price tag either.

To create a new screenplay, select the Screenplay template under Scriptwriting when you create a new document, or hit command-8 in a blank document to enter Screenplay Mode.

Corkboard: Rise of the index cards

Suppose you want to write a gripping cinematic masterpiece about, oh, let's say Dominic Toretto and the Fast & Furious crew battling the Universal Monsters with the power of street racing and FAMILY. Before you begin, you'll want to make sure that your epic's plot has the kind of sturdy, logical consistency for which the other Fast & Furious films are so justly famed.

Scrivener's Corkboard view can help. Start by hitting command-2, or clicking the icon that looks like a square divided into fourths in the top icon bar, just to the right of center.

Corkboard view turns every document in your project into a virtual index card. You can quickly add new scenes with cmd-N, then add titles and brief synopses directly on the cards. As they appear on the cork board, they'll also show up as documents in your Screenplay folder in the Binder on the left side of the window.

Corkboard view is a great way to quickly rough out the skeleton of your story. By looking at the entire plot from above, as it were, you can easily spot gaps and inconsistencies that you might miss if you just started writing blind. Novels can meander however they like, but most screenplays need this kind of strong structure, if only to satisfy the expectations moviegoers bring with them to the theater.

If you realize that your story flows better if Roman Pearce meets the Brides of Dracula before Letty Ortiz gets interrogated by Dr. Frankenstein, Corkboard view also lets you drag and drop cards to reorder them.

The formatting supremacy

Once you've broken your story, you're ready to start writing scenes. Professional screenplays must follow strict formatting rules, often involving a lot of tedious setting and re-setting of margins. Luckily, Scrivener takes care of all of that for you — whether you know how to format a screenplay or not.

Keep an eye on the lower right area of the writing pane. In black, you'll see how Scrivener's formatting the current bit of text you're writing.

For blank scenes, Scrivener always starts with a scene heading:

INT. FRANK'S WORKSHOP - NIGHT

Just to the left of the current formatting, you'll see your options for next steps in gray.

Depending on what kind of formatting block you're in, pressing Tab or Return can invoke the next logical type of formatting. For example, hitting either key at the end of a scene heading shifts you into the Action format:

Hobbs and the Wolfman LURCH INTO FRAME, the Wolfman's jaws TEARING INTO the foam pad around Hobbs's arm. Hobbs punches the Wolfman in the snout, over and over.

From there, hitting Tab twice gets you a character name, with a subsequent Return setting up that character's dialogue:

HOBBSBad dog! Very! Bad! Dog!

… while hitting Tab three times instead gets you a transition:

DISSOLVE TO:

The gray suggestions can help guide you through each page of your script. And if the formatting goes awry — as it more than occasionally does, in my experience — just select the mis-formatted text, then choose the right format from the same pulldown menu that tells you the current format.

The write stuff

Once your peerless achievement in screenwriting is complete, you can easily format it for print or PDF publication — or export it as a Final Draft or Fountain document for further polishing. We'll explain how to compile your finished work in the last part of this series. But next, we'll explore some of the lesser-known features that really help Scrivener shine.

I've been writing fiction for just over 15 years now, from MS Word back in the day to Google Docs, and even Scrivener. While I've spent time with just about every writing program out there, the program I can't help but use is Dabble Writer. It's a new subscription-based service that aims to help you finally write that novel you've been furtively working on for the past three years to no avail.

From the price to features to usability and support, I've got all the details for you here.

Built to write novels

When it comes to most writing programs, you're dealing with something that was built to let people work no matter what the project. While it's always nice to have access to fourteen trillion different features, it's easy to get bogged down. Dabble offers a pared-down experience that does its job, and lets you get to the work of writing without anything to get in your way.

When you initially get started, you'll create a new project. You can make this a single novel, or a singular place for all of the books in a particular series or timeline. Once you get in there, things are pretty simple. You've got a screen dominated by the word document in front of you with sidebars to the left and right that deliver handy information. On the left is where you'll find all of the documents in a project, including plot notes and character or location settings. To the right are notes for the scene you are working within, along with a word counter and stats from your last 30 days of writing.

Adding a new scene, chapter, character sketch or even book to an existing project is easy, and its easy to find. It all lives on the sidebar to the left. This of course means that it's easy to add new characters, as well as tossing in sketches of locations, or slotting in scenes that you still need to write. It's easy to tab between something you're working on already, and these sketches.

Just keep writing

Since Dabble isn't overflowing with features, it makes it easy to get down to brass tacks and get words onto the page. The only real options you have while writing are bold or italics, meaning that dealing with formatting isn't going to be hugely problematic. While it is unfortunate that it doesn't have a mobile app yet, it's clear that Dabble has big plans for 2018 including bringing this platform to mobile devices.

There are times when writing with Dabble felt like I'd been stripped down to the bare essentials of MS Doc, but rather than this being problematic it was actually pretty helpful. I could see my word count as a glance when working towards a specific goal, and could easily see the scenes I'd finished already. Coming from Scrivener — which has basically every feature ever — to Dabble was a rough adjustment. I found that I was far more productive though, the only thing to concentrate on was finishing my manuscript rather than getting caught up in the middle of playing with specifics.

The community support for Dabble has been fantastic as well. They have a mighty small team, but are constantly asking their user base about the updates and features that we want to see. By supporting the program early I can ensure that as it grows, I have a hand in the type of features that are developed.

Plot it out

One of the few features that is an absolute boon to have easy access to is the plot grid. Using this, you can use an index card-style system to work out plot, character arcs, and where different strands of your story intersect. Some writers may never use this feature at all, but for anyone who is writing an intricate story with a big cast and plenty going on, being able to quickly reference your roadmap can be supremely handy.

You can create multiple columns and move cards around as you'd like, which is handy when things get shifty after you make it halfway through the novel. You can also add or remove cards if they no longer work and even create multiple plot grids. Those plot grids work both horizontally and vertically when you're drag and dropping cards and lets you label each column. This means for those planners (writers who prefer to plan out everything in excruciating detail) you have everything you need to stay organized at your fingertips.

The right price

While Dabble doesn't let me just out and out purchase it once and have it forever, it does come at a price that's entirely reasonable. When you first get started there is a free trial so that you can test everything out and make sure that this is the right writing program for you and what you want to accomplish.

It comes at just $9.99/month, and that drops even lower if you get in on a deal like I did during NaNoWriMo. It's a paltry enough amount that I'm not stressed about paying for my word processor each month, and it also keeps me motivated to continue working on new projects rather than just letting them stagnate in a folder forever.

Dabble also stores all of my projects in the cloud. While I can download backups of my files any time I want — and seriously, at least every 5000 words, back up your novel — it also means that no matter where I log in from, I have access to my work in progress. This is a huge deal for any novelist who has had a computer die or a file get corrupted when you're finally on a roll.

The right tool for the right job

Not every word processor has access to the same set of features, and that's definitely more than true of Dabble. I can't finetune the formatting which can be problematic, but overall the pared down experience does exactly what I need it to. It lets me focus less on the features, and more on the content that is pouring out of my brain and onto the page.

I have all the tools that I need right there on the page, and the few features I do wish were already available are in the pipeline. It's a solid price, a good program, and it lets me get down to what I'm really using it for. Writing novels.

Updated to reflect the current price of $9.99 per month.

See at Dabble

By design, you don't need to know every facet and feature of Scrivener to use it well. The following guide will help you get over any initial intimidation and begin putting words on the page.

Behold the Binder

When you create a new Scrivener project, choose the category and template that best fit what you're writing -- whether that's a novel, short story, screenplay, research paper, or more. Scrivener's templates come with helpful features customized for each type of project. The Novel template, for example, includes categories to list characters and places, examples of the front matter you'll need for manuscripts, paperbacks, or ebooks, and samples of how your finished work will look.

Once you make your new project, you'll see Scrivener main window. It's divided into three portions: the Binder at left, text in the center, and — once you reveal it with the rightmost button in the menu bar along the top of the window — the Inspector at right.

Start on the left side of the window. The Binder stores every file in your project. Actual writing goes in the Draft folder, which can contain subfolders and sub-subfolders to suit your needs.

I like to make each folder within the Draft section a chapter and make the documents within them discrete scenes within that chapter. But you can also write text for a folder itself, separate from the documents within it — say, if you wanted an introductory quote or a quick preface for the documents to follow.

Note the Research folder below your Draft. Here — again, with as many subfolders as you like — you can assemble reference material for your writing. Scrivener handles text, photos, PDFs, Quicktime video and audio, and web pages dragged in from Safari with aplomb. When writing about a car chase in the Chinese port city of Guangzhou, I used the Research folder to keep Google maps of the city and articles on all-electric Chinese supercars within easy reach.

Write in the middle

This, as they say, is where the magic happens. Or doesn't, depending on how bad your writer's block has hit you. Aside from the space for writing, you should observe a few other features here.

Use the bar running along the very top of this section to add basic styles and format text. Just below that, you'll see a navigation bar with the name of the current document. To the left of that name, left and right arrows navigate to and from each previous document you've viewed within the project like you would in a Web browser.

To its right, a three-horizontal-lines icon lets you jump quickly to other documents in the folder. Up and down arrows pop you to the beginning or end of your text. And a divided box icon lets you split your viewing window to see two documents at once.

At the very bottom of this section, Scrivener tallies your word count. If you're competing for National Novel Writing Month, or just thrive on challenges, a bullseye icon at the bottom of the screen will set a word count target. Once set, it turns into a progress bar to reveal how close you are to reaching your goal.

Good evening, dear Inspector

Scrivener squeezes many functions into the Inspector column on the right, but most — like custom metadata, bookmarks to other documents within your project, and comments or footnotes — you probably won't need at first. I find the Inspector most useful for its Synopsis & Notes pane, under the notepad icon.

With Synopsis, you can fill in a quick description of what should happen in the current document — useful for planning your plot before you start writing. And the Notes field provides space for reminders of elements you want to include or points you want to make.

Take a peek at Snapshots under the camera icon as well. If you're worried that you might lose something good when you start making revisions, take a Snapshot of the document by hitting cmd-5 or clicking the + button in the Snapshots pane. It'll save a version of that document as is for later inspection or retrieval.

Now, just sit down and open a vein

That's all you need to know to get started on your literary masterpiece (or tawdry-but-fun airport novel). If your ambitions lie more toward the silver screen, we'll next discuss how Scrivener can help you write screenplays.

Links:

• Drafts
• Merlin Mann
• Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) on Twitter
• Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Mint Mobile: Voice, data, and text for less. Get free first-class shipping with code VTFREESHIP.
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[background music]

Rene Ritchie: I'm Rene Ritchie. This is "Vector."

Vector is brought to you today by Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile lets you get all the US traditional wireless service you're used to but at a much lower price. How low? Like five gigabytes for three months for just $20 a month. Right now, they're doing a promotion where you buy three months, you get three months free.

You can even go to mintsim.com and enter promo code VT, VT as in vector, VTfreeship. You will get free first class shipping on any Mint Mobile purchase. Thank you, Mint Mobile.

Joining me today, Greg Pierce, a lovely, lovely fellow who makes one of my favorite apps. He makes several apps. But one of my favorite apps is Drafts. How are you, Greg?

Greg Pierce: I'm great. Thanks for having me one.

Rene: Also, because it would be just too easy to talk to you alone, we have a power user of Drafts on, someone who the audience may not be familiar, podcasters in general may not be familiar with. But I know and love him. It's Merlin Mann. How are you, Merlin?

Merlin Mann: Hey Rene. Thanks for having me.

Rene: Thanks for being here. The contents of this show is to have someone who makes an app and someone who just uses the hell out of the app, and talk about it, and see where we can get with it, and see what pro-tips or hidden gems we can pull out of it. Greg, could you tell us a little bit about Drafts to get us started?

Greg: Sure. Drafts on the surface is just a quick capture note-taking app. The original purpose of it was to be the starting place for any text you do on your phone, or your iPad, or your watch. Just a place to jot down ideas, a post of notes for your phone that gives you one place to always start.

If you've got text you want to get out, you just start in Drafts and figure out what you want to do with it later. The main goal of it was to remove the artifice, and the burden that came with so many other notes apps, where you had to make decisions upfront about where you wanted to save it, put it in a folder, or create a new note.

All that stuff just goes away with Drafts. You launch it, you type, and then later you figure out what you want to do with it, whether that's message it somewhere or send it to social media, or save it to a file, etc. That's the basic concept.

Rene: For me, it was like TiVo for text back in a time when Apple didn't make...I think there was no share sheet back when you launched it.

Greg: Correct. Yeah. It goes back. It came out originally in 2012, I guess. but with much more limited capabilities of iOS at the time.

Rene: You got into those callback URL stuff that the kids loved. [laughs]

Greg: Correct. I had already been messing with that for my dictionary app terminology to kind of provide services with an app, because there wasn't a system dictionary at the time, and I started messing with URLs to give a convenient way to look up words from other apps, and it kind of grew with that.

I brought that to Drafts to kind of enhance the capabilities to pass off that text you captured to, you know, OmniFocus, or to Things, or to a calendar app, or wherever that supported URL schemes.

Rene: Merlin, how did you get started with Drafts?

Merlin: I was wracking my brain this morning trying to remember exactly when it started, but I do feel like there was -- and Greg can probably provide the history and context for this -- but I feel like there was a time when I became aware in the era like post Simple Notes, when we got to a point where there was stuff that we could do on our phone, and my gosh, it would actually synch to different places, it was magical.

I feel like I became aware of a handful of apps for the iPhone that specialized in some of a kind of quick entry. The other ones, I've completely forgotten about, but suffice it to say, I became aware and tried several of these, because it seemed like a very interesting idea.

I wasn't entirely sure what I would be using it for, and to be candid, the first time I opened it, I was like, "What is this? So, your app is a text area? Like that's kind of a weird thing."

Greg: [laughs]

Merlin: As it grew, and I became aware, basically while it has been a journey to go through lots of different usages, power usage, and dumb guy usage of this app, it has been something that I use many times every day, ever since...

Not to shine Greg's Apple, but it was one of my most-used iOS apps of all time, and it's not only where I begin practically everything I type on my phone, all the way down to iMessage, it is also, has led to a sort of peridynamic change in how I think about ephemeral writing, in general.

To be honest, to extend that to longer form writing, too - I'd be happy to talk about that -- but it's been a real brain bender for me to realize that, as he said, the first thing is just get this down. You don't need to know what this is.

Where does this go? How long do you keep this? What will this turn into? It doesn't matter. You just click on Drafts and start typing. I've never looked back.

Greg: It's a trusted capturing system. To use David Allen's "Getting Things Done" terminology, it's just a place to get it out of your head and figure out what you want to do with it later.

Rene: I like it because it's creation first. I don't have to worry about the endpoint. It's similar to...

Like, sometimes I want to contact Merlin. Do I have to go iMessage? Do I have to go Mail? What app do I have? Then by the time I get to the app, I have to remember who I was trying to contact to begin with.

Humans are not good at changing state. Then we change a room, much less an app, other things fill up our heads, and we forget them. I found, especially back when there was app silos, I would put text into something, and then I wouldn't know where it was, maybe I deleted the app off my phone, and it was gone.

I liked it almost the same way I liked Adam Lisagore's, what was it, Birdhouse?

Merlin: Mm-hmm.

Rene: I got to finely craft tweets. I loved this because it gave me a unified starting point to really, not just jot down an idea, but continue to work on an idea over time.

Greg: Anecdotally, my aha moment for deciding to make Drafts was I opened up an email message on my phone, and started typing a message to my wife one day. I realized about halfway through my sentence, this needed to be a text message, that she needed to get it quicker.

That was really painful, especially back then. You had to stop. You had to select the text. You had to copy it. You had to quit the mail app. You had to go to messages. You had to find the conversation with the person you wanted to send it to. Open it up, paste it in, and by that time, you really didn't even care if you got it on message anyway.

[laughter]

Merlin: There's a lot of opportunities for aha moments using this app, I have found. You can tell it's a really good app because when you explain it to somebody, they just kind of stare at you blankly.

There's a lot of power and a lot of different levels to it. Obviously, first of all, if there's I know I need to jot down, pretty obviously, that's the place I'm going to start. Also, to Greg's point, what if I just know this needs to be something I need to capture, but I'm not sure what it needs to turn into?

As a side note, add to this the fact that as of this year now, I've been using a Mac for 30 years, any time a friend of mine tells me how they type something into a text area, like poor Dan Moren will type something, and type something, and type something with paragraphs into a text area [laughs] [inaudible 7:20] and I lost the window with the CMS crash, or something. [laughs]

I will never have that happen to me again. That will never happen to me again, because all text gets created in here. Then, I think, the level of sophistication is, it's difficult to describe. It's very cognitively different as an approach, either creatively, intellectually, however you think of it.

Most things I have in there, for probably obvious reasons, are fewer than 140 characters, some are a lot longer. All I know is whether it's a dream, a thought, or a to-do item, it goes into there. You can do this with your watch. You can do this with your phone, you iPad, whatever it is, and now the next device that you pick up, it's going to be synched on there, too, and you can pick up wherever you need to go.

Their beauty part is, it can be so ephemeral. I could go back in and delete probably hundreds of thousands of those little note files, but they take up so little space, and in return, I have the ultimate ubiquitous capture device, that simply doesn't and, arguably, maybe cannot fail me.

It's not even getting into what you can do after you've typed that text. I would make the case that, yeah, you need something like this, whether you know it or not. You need a place to go type.

That could be Vesper. It could be a million things you could choose to do. A little hard to get out of Vesper at this point, but Gruber still uses it.

[laughter]

Merlin: I just would want to make the case that for someone who does say, "I heard this podcast. This sounds like an interesting app," and you open it up and just see a white area and a keyboard, trust me there's a lot more to it. It's going to take you more than half a day to get your head around how you will use this, but it becomes very powerful.

Greg: The one thing for me, is that I find this kind of stuff good for the soul. I'm upset, actually, that Georgia Dowell's not here, because she can explain this way better than I can.

Like when you dream, you take all the cache from your brain and you write it to your neural hard drive. I find that, in life, there's so many things I'm trying to keep in mind, that I just perseverate over them, and I'm always anxious and nervous that I'll forget that thing that's really important.

Once I put it down, I can relax. [laughs] My entire neural system can just relax and know that it's safely stored somewhere.

There's other things I can use. There's notes.app and there's other products that you can use on...and if you want to, you can get on what's different, your best of breed solutions on different things that synch, but I like this because it's plain text.

I don't have to worry about formatting. I don't have to paste it in, and see the thing is like giant font because I copied a title, or the bulleting is all messed...

I can just put the text in there, and know that it's in there. To your point, Merlin, if I vaguely remember something from a year ago that is suddenly really important again, I can just go find it. I can store bits of information like travel numbers, that I need rarely, but I do really need them when I need them.

I think even my Lego VIP number is in there...

Rene: [laughs]

Greg: ...so I can get into to the store when I go there, once a year, to buy gifts. It saves me ever having to worry about where small snippets, and even longish streams of text data is stored.

Merlin: I think it's also neat that...Like I say, everything starts here. Not everything ends here. But as soon as I get to the point where I find I've got things like snippets of HTML, my brain has been retrained, reformed, to know that that's the point when I click on the dingus. I say, "Go create a Dropbox file."

In my case, that is the natural...If it's a tweet, if it's not just an ephemeral bit of text, a password I want to make sure I'm typing correctly, whatever that is, then the thing becomes I click on the I don't know what it's called. You click on the dingus. I say, "Make a Dropbox file."

For me, what that does is that takes whatever the first line is and adds a space and a date stamp, a Unix-ish date stamp, and then pops that into a folder that will now sync via Dropbox to nvALT and Editorial and everything that I use. I guess part of the trick also is to know when to stop using. But you've reduced that resistance.

My life changed when I started carrying around a stack of index cards and a pencil or a Space Pen at the time. I just never had to think about it. I never had to sweat it anymore. I knew there was a place.

That's what this is for me. But then, as I say, the other cognitive shift is then to know when to stop using it. It doesn't make it any diminished as an app. That's the whole job of this app is it's pneumatic tubes for your brain that just shoots stuff to wherever it needs to go.

Rene: Is it tough to figure the beginning and end points for that, Greg, when you're working on keeping it simple but giving it features?

Greg: It's difficult. It is something I feel like I haven't done a good enough job of, that the app is not approachable enough to some people because once they get past that text box part and they go to act on it, I've by default shown them a wall of actions, like, "Look at everything the app can do."

I did that originally because what's the visibility? Maybe they don't know it can integrate with Evernote. They use Evernote. If I don't put some sample actions in there, they don't know what to do with it.

By doing that, it's a little intimidating for a lot of users, too. I think it gives them the impression that they're not utilizing the app to its full potential, which maybe they aren't but maybe they don't need to. Maybe it doesn't matter.

I've always envisioned people would find a place for Drafts in their workflow and probably only do three or four different things with it. Maybe they'll text message with it, maybe they'll draft their tweets in it, and save some notes to Dropbox. Maybe that's all they need to do with it.

The fact that it integrates with so many things allows more people to find those handful of things that they need to do with the app. Does that make sense? If you use Evernote and Dropbox but this other guy uses Google Drive, you don't need to use all those things.

They're all there for you. But you probably as an individual user are going to use two, three, four of those services it integrates with that match up with what your needs are.

The problem is finding a balance to explain to users and expose the things they need without cluttering the interface with the things they don't and making them possibly feel guilty about not doing more with the app than they do when they shouldn't. They should just get what they need out of it.

Merlin: That's the trick with disclosure. You see Apple struggling with this, too. When do we prompt Apple Pay Cash is available to you and when do you think that's a hostile ad intrusion? It seems like a delicate Zelda versus Mario balancing act.

Greg: Right. There's no perfect answer. It's different for different people. I've erred at the side of not intervening, especially because of the quick capture nature of the app. You don't want to launch it one day and get this pop-up that's telling you about all these new features when you're just trying to get your idea down. It's intrusive. It's difficult to balance in that type of productivity app.

Merlin: As long as we're talking about nostalgia for Twitter apps, I feel like...Obviously I have a special affection for Birdhouse. But another one, I think it was Birdfeed. Was that the one that Nevin worked on? I think it was Birdfeed.

Greg: Maybe.

Merlin: It was one of the first apps I remember doing a really canny job. You see this now in things like Tweetbot or you see this in so many apps now where you're probably here to look at your friend's toots and to toot out yourself sometimes. That's all right there. You click on this thing to do your little draft, etc., etc.

There may have been many others before, but I remember Birdfeed being uniquely good at, "Hmm, I wonder what happens if I slide across this thing." You go, "Whoa!" There's a whole other room under this house. There's all this stuff to do under here.

That's neat because, first of all, as every Apple user knows, one of the most sublime joys of using Apple when it's at its best is you try something that you're pretty sure won't do anything. Then it does exactly what you expected. That's an instance of that. That's an instance where, "Oh, there's so much more stuff I can do underneath here. But if I don't need to see that..."

The developers can then say when somebody says, "Hey, why don't you add A, B, C, D, E?" They can say, "Well, you know actually just swipe right, and you'll be happy to see that that already exists in there." That's a nice disclosure feature is that...

Then I guess you take it to an extreme, that becomes 3D Touch. People just stop even trying to do it which is a shame because it's extremely powerful. That's the beauty of that.

Given that this app is so austere candidly, once you get past the fact that it's a text area that you do a thing in, it can be super overwhelming. This is true of things like Workflow. This is true of so many apps. Workflow in another age would be how I spent all day. All I would do is make Workflow things all day. But as it is right now, it's like download a YouTube video, and I walk away...

[laughter]

Merlin: ...because it's so overwhelming to me. I feel like it's a candy and porn store where I don't even want to cross the transom because I know if I go in, I will never leave.

That's the neat part of this is if you stick with these kinds of apps long enough and you make them part of your tool set, it becomes invisible. You get muscle memory. You hear me using words like dingus and thingy because I don't what it is. I don't know the key command for all the things on a Mac. But I can sure do it without thinking about it.

That's when you know a tool has really succeeded for you is when you know that if you had to do something in there, you could. But you mostly just need to do...A hammer needs to make nails go into wood. You pick one you like. You just hammer the crap out of stuff.

Rene: It's a terrible analogy, but when they moved from iOS 6 which had its richness expressed in textures and to iOS 7 which had its richness expressed in the modeling of physical behaviors, that's sort of what Drafts was like to me. It's that it does look austere.

There's not a million buttons on the screen, but the richness is all in the actions that you do with what you put in that blank canvas.

Greg: Right. There's a lot of tools in there that advanced users have taken advantage of. They do share what they do. There are ways to get actions other people have used. I have a directory people put things in to share the stuff they've created with it. You don't need to be an advanced user to take advantage of people creating advanced things on it.

There's always that struggle. The saying is, "Why spend a minute doing something you can spend four hours automating?"

Rene: Do you have the same experience as Marco? Because when I see the Overcast feed, someone's like, "He says you can swipe left to do that." They go, "Oh my god, when did you add that?" He's like, "Three years ago."

Merlin: We're talking, I guess, in sort of generalities about the app. I want to give an example of something that will be blindingly obvious and very, very old to people who already this app, but I want to give an example of something.

For a long time, for me, there was somebody who used to obsess, more than is healthy about email and what it does to our brain. There was a time when I got to where I was talking to people, and trying to come up with a way to be able to generate the equivalent of hitting C in Gmail.

I wanted to be able to write and send an email without seeing my inbox or anything else related to alerts, related to Gmail, and eventually I came up with one of those that was pretty good. People used it. It was fine. It was a bookmark, basically.

This may not be canonical, but the way I have this in Drafts is I type something that is the first line of the document. I add a couple of returns, and then I type some more stuff, and then I hit a button.

What happens is that turns the first line, to me this is such an elegant use of this app, and the way its simplicity can be so, as I say, sublime. Guess what, it knows that first line with the returns under it, anything that's on the first line, that's your subject line. Anything under that, is the body of the email.

You enter in the address of the person you want to send -- I think this is how it works, correct me if I'm wrong -- and basically you just shoot out an email from inside the app. I haven't used it in a while, but I don't even ever have to open mail.app. Mail.app, to me is in Microsoft Word...

Rene: [laughs]

Merlin: ...I only ever open it by accident. I don't want to see that. My job right now is not to be alerted about things I'm not doing. My job is to do this very atomic task, and then get back to whatever else I'm doing.

That's just one example of what is probably at least dozens, and probably hundreds of cases, shooting stuff to reminders, shooting stuff in natural language into a calendar, all the different kinds of things. I want to make sure we highlight how you actually use this magic, rather than just hand wave it, because once you have that thing installed, you just hit that button, and you're doing incredibly powerful stuff from that little text area.

Rene: How does that work, Greg? How do you set all that up?

Greg: It depends on the service. I integrate with everything possible on iOS, so there are mail actions and, due to the nature of the APIs, it does actually pop open a mail window. You don't leave the app, but it's the same as if you use the share sheet, and select to mail something, or to message something.

Those APIs allow you to pre-fill for the message. That includes recipients as well as subjects, bodies, and stuff.

My probably most used actions in Drafts are a set of messaging actions I have set up to pre-address my wife, to my kids and stuff, so I can start from Drafts, type my little message and just click one button to send a text to my wife, without having to go into messages and find the conversation, etc.

Same thing for other services like a standard share, or printing, or stuff that OS provides. Then there's direct integration with a lot of services, stuff like Dropbox and Evernote, Google Drive, OneDrive. I've integrated the APIs they provide to do that same sort of functionality, and make it kind of invisible to the user so that with one click they can have a configured file put where they want it.

There's a lot of advance configuration in there. There's a template engine with tags that let you control what you want the file to be named, and what folder it's in, and do you want time stamps included or stuff in addition to the content of the draft.

Otherwise, it's grown over time. The first version didn't integrate with this many services, but that's been the obvious place to grow the app over time, and find new audiences, is just add more services it can integrate with.

[background music]

Rene: We're going to take a quick break, so I can draft this action that is thanking Thrifter for sponsoring the show. Thrifter.com, the best site you can go to, to get great deals, all day, all the time -- deals from Amazon, from Best Buy, from everybody on the Internet.

Things like SD cards, hard drives, or they've even an AirPods. [laughs] I couldn't believe they found AirPods deal over Black Friday.

It's an incredibly dedicated team of people, who scour, literally scour, with like magnifying glasses and Sherlock hats. They scour the Internet, and they find the best stuff, tell you why it's so good, what the historic deals have been, whether you should act on it now, wait for a lower price.

There won't be a lower price. It's hardly in stock. It's currently in stock. Everything that I know I need to know, and I think you'd find helpful to know as well. That's Thrifter.com. Thanks, Thrifter.

[background music]

Rene: I remember a while ago, Merlin, you said something on "MacBreak Weekly." It was like, if you ever did something more than once, you just made it an X Expander action. Is that sort of what you with Drafts?

[crosstalk]

Rene: Like if you start doing things that are the same, you end up making a program for it?

Merlin: There was a time, I'll be dead honest with you. There's something almost like a bell-shaped curve with my Drafts usage. This also goes for Editorial, which is my...I hope I'm not talking out of school.

Those are apps that I pair together quite nicely, is to be able to start anything in Drafts. Anything where I got to do a lot of stuff, I'm gonna pull it out on my iPad and use Editorial, or nvALT, or TextMate, or whatever that is.

Essentially, I feel like it's a little bit of a dark art to know the hack inside of hack. My daughter now uses the words "life hacks," and I can't even tell her how bizarre...

Rene: [laughs]

Merlin: I brushed her hair this morning and she was "Life Hacks" videos, and I just turned to my wife and I said, "Could you ever..." The word "imagine" didn't even come out of my mouth. She turned and was like, "No, I could never have imagined."

Rene: [laughs]

Merlin: [jokingly] This horrible monster I helped create. A hack inside a hack is awareness. It is the presence of mind to notice there's more friction here than you would like, more friction than is necessary.

The next step is to realize that whether that's something that is a necessary annoyance of what you are doing, or is it essential to what you're doing, like is that important annoyance in your jobs and that's why you get the big bucks.

Becoming aware of that, yeah. In my bell curve of this, I started out going doy, type, type, type, and then at a certain point, [laughs] like with everything, because of my dumb ADD-addled brain, I tried all of them, and I'm organizing them into tabs, and I'm doing all the things.

There's so many things in there that I've never used more than once. Ditto Editorial, there's so much stuff. There was that fat part of the curve. When I realized I could get stuff into reminders, and if memory serves - I haven't done it in a while - there's all this natural language stuff that actually works. It's crazy, fantastic how...

Now today, really, it is down to...This is not to diminish this app in any way, it's to show its power, is that, yes, everything starts in there.

Most things either become something like a tweet. It becomes something that will then get saved to a Dropbox file.

I'm trying to think of other stuff I do a lot. I'll do basic mark down in there, but to answer your question, I think that's true. I think it also takes restraint, though, to realize, when you're shaving a yak...

Rene: [laughs]

Merlin: ...and when you're actually going in and doing more.

We joke about this, but if you're answer is everything is e.max, to paraphrase the man, you got two problem, now. You have to also be aware when you are allowing your mind to drift away from what it is you actually need to be doing.

Here's another tip. You ready for this? Ready for a tip inside the tip, a hack inside the hack? Start a text file, where you write down stuff you'd like to automate.

I used to call these mosquito tasks, like little things that I'm not going to do right now, but Thursday afternoon, I'm going to go in, and I'm going to look at my list of stuff, see what I can delete, see what I can do, and that's a great way to...

You don't have to stop and do it right now, but go put that in your Thursday afternoon pile, then go to the Drafts directory and see if there's something for that that already exists. Look at Workflow. Is there something for that that already exists. Editorial, there's so much powerful stuff in there.

Don't let your head get out of the game when you're being productive, because then you're not really being productive.

Rene: Don't let the...

[crosstalk]

Merlin: I should do this for a job. I'd be good at this.

Rene: You should. You should...

[crosstalk]

Merlin: Instead of making poop jokes on podcast, I should be writing to help people.

Greg: Start a blog or something.

Merlin: I should get a blog. [laughs]

Rene: I like the text space to-dos, because I love my OmniFocus. I love my Things, but I often feel like to-do apps are like the gym memberships of the app store, where you have them...

Merlin: [laughs]

Rene: ...and they're so aspirational, but then managing the to-do app becomes the to-do, itself.

It sounds primitive, but when you have just a bunch of stuff in a text file, there's no real excuse making. It's either on the line or you deleted it, and you can sort of go on with your day.

Greg: For me, I found the best way to get all your to-dos done is to move to a new to-do management system.

Rene: [laughs]

Merlin: Mm-hmm.

Greg: Which I do about every year. It really takes care of that backlog.

Rene: I was joking with Culture Code, I said, "I wish they'd make an app called Thing, where you're only allowed to have one at a time, and you can't get an extra slot until you've completed it, because I feel like that would give me [inaudible 26:32] . [laughs]

Merlin: Oh, god, that's such a good idea. I can't even tell you how much stuff. I'm still an Arden fan. I don't know why I feel so defensive about needing to say this. Yes, I still use OmniFocus.

My go-to right now is TaskPaper. The TaskPaper format, the TaskPaper app. I do a lot of my task management in Editorial, as a .task paper file. It makes little buttons you can tick off. It is very nearly fiddle-proof, in a way that I find very satisfying.

I'm looking at mine right now on my Mac version of TaskPaper, made by Jessie...What is it? What's the name of his company?

Greg: Uh.

Merlin: He has a funny company name, too...

[crosstalk]

Merlin: Yes, but I've got an area called Inbox, an area called House, an area called Office, an area called Waiting on, and then a big bunch of space at the bottom, and I just put stuff in there. I occasionally move stuff around. I have, literally, four tags. That's all that I use.

Every day, I go in there and say, "How much of this stuff can I delete?"

[laughter]

It's so freeing to not feel like part of my job is attending a rabbit hutch full of context and projects. It's like this is the stuff that needs to get done. If it doesn't, there's going to be problems. You get this, you got a calendar. You got Drafts. Move on with your life.

Rene: I saw Ken at WWDC, Ken Case from the Omni Group, right after they announced Core ML. I just went up to him and I said, "Can you please use this to just remove stuff from OmniFocus that you know I'm never gonna do." [laughs]

Merlin: Figure out the stuff I know I'm not willing to admit I'm never going to do.

[laughter]

Rene: [jokingly] Just make a new network model and handle that for, me.

Merlin: Do my reviews for me. [laughs]

Rene: I'll feel more accomplished. I'll just look at the list going down. Wow. It's amazing.

Greg, you're working towards version 5.0 now, is that right?

Greg: That's correct, and I've been working on it for almost close to two years. Time constraints, obviously. I'm not working on it full time, but it was time to rebuild the app. It's been around long enough to take it to the next level and to really make it ready for the future, it was time to reconstruct, and re-envision the app.

It's coming early next year, hopefully, and it's a really big update.

Rene: Do you have a guiding theme or principal that you have behind it?

Greg: In all cases, I wanted to maintain the simplicity, but for people who want to do more with it, I wanted the power to be there.

We've added a lot of stuff, like tagging that has been very much requested, just to allow you to have sort of different context in the app. If you dump a lot of stuff into it, it's nice to be able to have some level of organization to them before you get around to sending them off to Things.

We've rebuilt the whole scripting flow in it to be a lot more powerful. The automation stuff that is in Drafts now, is mostly focused about what you want to do with this current draft.

There's tools to manipulate the text and the script, before you send it off somewhere. The app is now going to have tools that let you do much broader, more powerful things to integrate with almost any Web service, even if we don't directly support it, there's tools to integrate with any service.

There's the ability to integrate with multiple accounts from any service, so people who have business or home Dropboxes will be able to work with both of them simultaneously. There's ways to manipulate, create, and use multiple drafts and actions all at once.

You can take something you wrote down, a series of events you wrote into one Drafts box, and break them up line by line, and create calendar events, or reminders from each of them, things like that, that are going to add a lot more power to the app.

I hope, with the somewhat unsure future of Workflow, and where Apple's going to go with that, I think there's a lot of voids that people are going to be looking to fill over the next year in productivity, and I think Drafts is going to be ready to fill those niches.

Rene: I feel like such a caveperson because our whole CMS for Mobile Nation for iMore follow that is based on a really custom Drupal. But what I end up using Drafts for is it is a nightmare.

I use my phone a lot. I'm out a lot. I need to be able to do everything that I can do on my phone. But editing inside Drupal is just a nightmare, especially on a phone. I routinely select all, copy, paste into Drafts. Do everything I need to do there. Copy, paste back. It is horribly antiquated and manual. But it works.

Or with Libsyn, trying to get show notes in, I'll copy them out, paste them into Drafts, copy them back.

Merlin: Libsyn, that is so brutal.

Rene: It totally is! But Drafts gives me a place where I can work with...Yes, it is some pain to get it in and out. But it's way better than trying to do it where it lives.

Merlin: They don't have a save button. They have a publish button.

Rene: I spent so long trying to use Marzen. But It just...I can't do it on...

Merlin: You go to Libsyn. You put your stuff in. I want to change the episode canonical title for "Reconcilable Differences." I've already...It's published. But it's published to download only. But then to save it, I click publish again. My brain just aches.

Rene: God help you if you make it a draft. Not your Drafts but if you make it a draft instead of publishing it, trying to figure out how to actually publish it from the drafts requires Cirque de Soleil contortions.

Merlin: You accidentally posted it to that beautiful Libsyn podcast download page.

Greg: The editor is something we spent a lot of time on, too. I've really tried to make everything about editing in Drafts a better experience as while and built an extensible thing.

My goal, and this is not a goal I'm going to hit per se but the model I'm working towards is having a BBEdit of iOS, just your go-to text editing tool as well as just the capture for those sorts of situations where you don't want to use the editor and something else.

Just paste it in Drafts, make it what it needs to be, use the tools to clean up the text or whatever, and then put it back where it needs to belong.

Merlin: You'll have to buy a lot of parrots to catch up with Rich Siegel, sir.

Greg: No doubt.

Rene: Are there anything that you've seen in terms of what customers ask you for or just the cool things they share with you that were more popular than you expected or things that surprised you? People were using it in ways you didn't expect.

Greg: There's been a lot of that over the years. Certainly, one of the big revelations with the big URL scheme and x-callback process is that was never really envisioned for some of the things people use it for and obviously what Workflow would eventually become.

In the early days when people came up with looping actions that would use these URL schemes to send one line of a draft off to Fantastic Cow, create the event, come back to Drafts, use the next line, back and forth, back and forth, and do these things that I never envisioned anyone trying to do with the app...

When it comes down to uses I didn't envision, I have trouble coming up with great examples. A lot of people have hooked it into Workflows outside of Drafts so that you write that file to Dropbox. Then they have some engine running on their Mac that watches that folder and uploads those things to some other service somewhere.

Those kind of things are just amazing that people have spent the time and found my tool fits into that workflow somewhere is exciting always.

Rene: What about you, Merlin? Have you come up with anything that surprised you, anything that you were just really excited to share?

Merlin: From a tech standpoint, no, not really. It's funny to be in that very small one-digit percentage of people who use nerdy apps like this, but I'm not nearly at the full far end, at the .001 percent who are doing things like multiple callbacks.

It's real boring. It's real, real boring in the best possible way. It's so satisfying to me to be able...I'm not made of stone. I get excited about new hardware. Sometimes software can be good. It's a peculiar joy of my middle age years to be able to settle on a handful of things that work really well for now.

A la the great John Stuart Kewso, I'll change when I have to. I'll change my scroll direction when they make me, all that kind of stuff. That's what John says anyway. I tend to agree with that.

There was a time in my life where my vocation and my hobby was very much testing and trying every single one of these and then writing about it and thinking about it and talking about it. I'm not against that. There's also something really satisfying about coming up with a set of tools that almost perfectly fits your needs.

I've talked to many places about what those tools are for me. Drafts is definitely one of those. I don't want to make this into an ad. That cognitive shift has been a really big thing for me. It's really nice to know this is hooked up with my text expander, this can go to Dropbox.

Then When I think about what I look for in an app like this, the quick capture starts the whole flow. If it doesn't have that, it's not going to happen. Yes, I want the options for what to do next.

Something that surprises me sometimes is how often I go back and search for stuff that was in there before. I like to do things like say, "Oh, here were the runner up titles for this week's episode of 'Due by Friday.'" I'll go. I'll just copy. It saves me five second. But I'll go and copy the text from before, change the episode numbers, etc., etc.

That fast finding, when I think about, god bless it, what Simple Notes was like back in the day, trying to find stuff in Simple Notes. Now today, everything is just lightning fast, but then I guess it's that ubiquity. It's knowing that if I have the presence of mind to just jot something down, I'll be able to get to it later from my other devices or I'll be able to set it to where it needs to go.

While that may not be the thing that sells it to somebody who hasn't started using, I hope it's something that users can nod along with, that it is the rare app that so fits what you need to do but then helps you understand what you could be doing better. That's what Drafts has really done for me.

Rene: The one thing that I thought is fascinating, just to bring it back to the core level, is there are some things that are easy yeses and easy nos, at least when I look at it. Some things I would never do that or I absolutely have to do that.

There's some things that seem much more subtle. For example, a long time ago, Greg, we had a conversation about whether new note...When you launch drafts, it should come up with a blank screen so you can immediately start your new note or the last note you worked on so you could immediately continue your thought.

I know of apps have wrestled with that. Some will just do the settings, that you can choose your preference. A lot of people never go into or look at or change settings. It's those things where you could make a case on either side that I think is the most interesting story about which ones get chosen is the most interesting story about an app and its developer.

Greg: Right. The solution to that in Drafts was to create a time out that if there's a situation where you're working on a note and you want it to stay there, you're flipping back and forth and adding to it from Safari and whatever and then there's a situation where you come to the app and you don't always want the same behavior. What Drafts does is there's a time out. It defaults to 60 seconds. You can change...

Merlin: I'm a five-minute man, title.

Greg: What it says is if you come back to Drafts within that period of time, within that window, we're going to leave you on the last draft you were working on. If you come back and it's been longer than that, if it's been more than five minutes since you've used Drafts, we can make the assumption that you probably want to start on something new and give you that new draft.

It is a setting you can adjust. The 60 second behavior seems to be what I settled on as the best default and what works best for most people.

Rene: Are there a lot of cases like that where you've had to figure out multiple usage cases?

Greg: Absolutely. It's the great thing about a mature app is over time with a dedicated user base, you hear from them. Sometimes you get the off the wall suggestions that are only applicable to one person's workflow. You got to filter those out. They're not going to be better for everyone or it's not worth adding a setting for that particular need.

As these apps mature, you add those things that there's justifiable cases for different behaviors or you tweak things like the time outs and stuff so that they work best for the most people.

Rene: Because you can't take a feature away afterwards. People get super upset. It's better not to add it.

Greg: I have taken features away. I will take features away.

[laughter]

Greg: Sometimes it makes sense.

Rene: Any prominent examples? Or you don't want to refresh those old wounds?

Merlin: [laughs]

Greg: I'm working on Drafts 5. I don't think I'm going to support posting to Google+ right now. I just don't think the demand's there for me to reimplement that.

Rene: We had that discussion on our website because one of our websites is Android Central. They're huge Google users. They still have a lot of interaction. Nobody else did. We eliminated it everywhere else. But on that one part of it, we just couldn't touch it. It was fascinating. Rest in peace, Google+.

Merlin, any final hacks you'd like to share?

Merlin: Geez, let me look.

Rene: Put you on the spot.

Merlin: Boy, I am so freaking boring with how I use this. I have all these tabs. "Post this to Tumblr as a link. Post this to Tumblr as a quote." I haven't used that in two years. It's so stupid.

Rene: [laughs]

Greg: The only other big use case that I have a big number of users doing that we didn't talk about is diaries or logging. A lot of people use it for things like they set up a thing that appends to a file somewhere, either in Evernote or in Dropbox or whatever, so that they have several of these set up for keeping lists.

They hear about a movie they want to see or something like that. They have an action that they can just type the name of the movie, hit the action, and it appends it to that list so that when they go to look it up later, they've got one file that here's all the movies I want to go see.

Merlin: So elegant.

Greg: Or people do daily diary type of stuff that appends to files in Dropbox. You can set up the naming so that it automatically rolls over to a new file every week or every day or whatever. You just have an action that you type a little something about what you were doing that day or you log events.

People use it for stuff like medical needs. I've heard from diabetics who track their sugar measurements in it and just have an action that logs their measurement to the file. They can just bring up Drafts and punch it in when they do it and be done and be able to bring that file to their doctor at the end of the month or whatever.

Merlin: Sounds so much more elegant which what I would do is just go to file, tediously go all the way down to the next insertion point, and then continue from there.

Greg: It's just a little time saver. That's one of those things. If you're diabetic and you're doing that X number of times a day, that's when automating it becomes a valuable proposition.

Rene: I want to thank both of you for spending this time together. I always love this because there's so much more I want to do with apps. But I'm sort of limited by time but also by my own creativity. I want to hear how other people use them. It's really inspirational. I appreciate it.

Greg: Thanks for having us on. It was fun...

Merlin: Thanks, man.

Greg: ...different format.

Rene: Merlin, if people want to find you on the interwebs or they want to listen to some of the other podcasts that you do, where can they go?

Merlin: You can go to merlinmann.com. I do a bunch of different podcasts, but just go get Drafts. Go look me up, but go buy Drafts. Am I on your page, Greg?

Greg: I think I do have a pull quote from you.

Merlin: I should probably give you a new and even more exaggerated pull quote about how much I love this app, just a meltdown on the Internet. Can you make an action where you type it into Drafts, press a button, and it updates your quote? [laughs] Wait a minute. Clear my calendar.

Greg: I don't know. I might catch him on a really grumpy day. I don't know if I want to give him that power.

Rene: [laughs] What about you, Greg? Where can people find out more about you and Drafts?

Greg: Agiletortoise.com is my website and also my Twitter handle, without the dot com on Twitter.

Rene: That's a limitation on Twitter's end, sir. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it.

Merlin: Thanks, man.

Greg: Thanks.

Rene: You can find me @reneritchie on Twitter, Instagram, all the socials. You can email me at rene@imore.com. Let me know what you think about the show and more shows like this or other things you'd like to see on the show.

If you haven't subscribed already, you can do so at Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Downcast, Pocket Cast, Caster, all the casters. The links are in the note shows. I want to thank you so much for listening. That's it. I'm out.

[music]

Before we get into the apps that make this possible, I think there are some basics that are helpful when starting.

This sort of automation is actually pretty simple. Text expansions apps allow me to type something short, like ;SH and have something longer — like Stephen Hackett — entered into my document or webpage. While my name only has 14 letters in it, three keystrokes is faster and easier on my hands.

When creating shortcuts, its important to use triggers that would be difficult to come across while typing otherwise.

For example, all of my triggers start with a semicolon. For example, to expand my email address, I type ;srf. This gets replaced by stephen@relay.fm automatically, but the semicolon at the beginning means I don't accidentally insert this snippet when I don't mean to. Dr. Drang switched from using a semicolon as a prefix to jj to make triggers easier to type on the iOS keyboard.

Either way, the result is the same. I've used a semicolon for son long, I'm not sure I could relearn my shortcuts without a lot of pain.

Text Expansion Apps

There are a few different apps that can be used to create these shortcuts.

iOS and macOS have a tool called Text Replacement. You can learn all about it in this iMore article. Text Replacement syncs via iCloud, and works in any iOS app, since it is baked into the operating system itself.

TextExpander by Smile Software is what I use. It's far more powerful than the built-in tool. TextExpander can expand far more than just text. As you will see in some of my examples, it can insert the contents of your clipboard, run AppleScript (on the Mac), use form data and more. It can be used on Windows 7 or higher, unlike Apple's solution. Additionally, TextExpander snippets can be used on iOS. It comes with its own third-party keyboard, but many text editing apps like Editorial, Drafts and 1Writer offer native support for your TextExpander library without the need to use Smile's keyboard.

TextExpander is about $40 a year, but it's totally worth it for me.

There are other options on the market as well. The $5 aText is fairly basic but gets the job done. Typinator is €25, and comes with some nice capabilities, such as support for fill-in forms like TextExpander. The $20 TypeIt4me has been around since System 6, which is incredible in and of itself.

Examples: Everyday Life

You don't have to be fancy when you get started with this stuff. Here are some of my most commonly used trigger and snippets that make every day life much faster:

• Home Address: ;123S → 123 Street
• Email Address: ;srf → stephen@relay.fm
• My blog's iTunes affiliate link: ;5aff → ?mt=8&at=11lt96
• Table-flippy guy: ;table → (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
• Something I should use more on Twitter: ;sda → Sorry. I don't argue on the Internet.

That last one is super helpful.

If I need to brighten someone's day, I can use ;hello and send them this:

☆。 ★。 ☆  ★

。☆ 。☆。☆

★。＼｜／。★   

 HEY BUDDY!

★。／｜＼。★

。 ☆。☆。☆

☆。 ★。 ☆  ★

Text replacements apps can double as spellchecker, correcting common mistakes, giving you the power to turn 'teh' into 'the' or 'iTouch' to 'iPod touch' every single time.

Examples: A Little More Nerdy

Apps like TextExpander can do a lot more than make a short line of text longer.

The app uses placeholders for things like:

• The Clipboard
• Current date in hours, minutes and seconds
• Current date

For example, these two snippets are useful if you need a timestamp to name a file in Finder:

• Current Date: ;date (Expressed as %Y-%m-%d in TextExpander's editor)
• Current time: ;time (Expressed as %I:%M %p in TextExpander's editor)

I often will have a URL on my clipboard and need to link to it in Markdown. If I type ;link, TextExpander creates a Markdown-formatted hyperlink using the URL, then moves my cursor to the correct place to type the words in my sentence that I want to be linked to said URL. The snippet looks like this:

%|

The percentage sign and pipe indicate where I want the cursor to be after the snippet is added to my document. I simply copy the URL I want to link to, type my trigger phrase, wait a moment, and then write what should be hyperlinked.

If I need create a Markdown image, I fire ;mdimg for the same snippet as above, just with an ! in front to denote an image.

TextExpander and a few other apps can execute AppleSript on the Mac. For example, if I type ;fsurl, this bit of AppleScript is run, which will fetch the front-most tab in Safari and paste its URL where my cursor is at the moment.

You don't have to keep snippets contained to text documents. For a while, I had a weird bug on my iMac that led to me needing to reboot Finder on a regular basis. I can still open Terminal and type ;die to send the command killall Finder. I hit return and — boom — Finder is unbroken.

Sharing is Caring

Another advantage of TextExpander is its ability to easily share snippets. If you manage a team account, you can push out changes to employee's accounts. This means your customer service reps can all be replying with updated boilerplate support text in mere moments. It's a great way to keep a team or company on the same page

Go Forth And Abbreviate

It's easy to get started in this. Take some common strings of text you use, like your home address or your email address, come up with a shorter version, and you're all set to go.

Do you use text snippets to speed up your work? Got some favorites? Share in the comments below!

Mobile game developer Zynga announced today that the newest iteration of its infamous word game, [Words With Friends 2], has officially been released globally. It offers multiple fun new ways to challenge your friends and yourself without straying too far from the format that made Words with Friends a staple.

Bernard Kim, President of Publishing at Zynga, touched on the company's dedication to pleasing its millions-strong fanbase in a statement:

If you've never played Words With Friends, it's basically exactly like Scrabble — you and your competitor take turns positioning letter tiles on a virtual game board, spelling words in a crossword fashion. Each letter tile is worth a certain number of points, and there are also spaces on the board that can increase a word's point value. The classic version of Words With Friends offered only two play modes — a normal mode, where you played against an opponent, and a Solo Play mode, where you played against the game's AI in order to hone your skills. Words With Friends 2 has upgraded that experience with the following additions:

• Solo Challenge mode: Essentially a new and improved version of Solo Play, Solo Challenge allows users to practice playing the game by pitting them against AI-powered WordMaster bots. In this mode, players will advance through a series of increasingly difficult matches, challenging them to push their strategic skills in order to improve.
• Lightning Round mode: In the Lightning Round mode — the first Words With Friends mode to allow users to play against more than one person at a time — players will join teams of five to compete in intense, rapid-fire matches where speed is key.
• Updated boosts: Boosts have been a thing in Zynga's games (like Word Streak with Friends for some time, but like Solo Challenge mode, they're getting an upgrade in the new flagship title. Boosts are a bit like hints, and give players advantages that help them both increase their scores and improve their strategic skills for future games. For instance, with the boost "Word Radar," players can preview all possible placements for a certain letter tile.
• Social Dictionary: Zynga has added more than 50,000 new words to Words With Friends 2's in-game dictionary, and have also enhanced it with in-depth stats that let players see how they match up against others re: amount of new words played.

In addition to all of those new functions, Words With Friends 2 also received a visual update, and is more minimalist and clean than its predecessor while still maintaining the important parts of the gaming interface users love.

If you'd like to upgrade to Words With Friends 2 from the original but fear that your current games and stats won't carry over, Zynga assures that all your data including your friends, your winning streak, and more will remain intact when you make the switch. If you've never played Words With Friends before, this shiny new release is a great place to start.

• Words With Friends 2 - Free - Download now

Questions?

What do you think about Words With Friends 2? Do you prefer it over the classic version? Give us a shout in the comments!

According to TechCrunch, this will be achieved through a combination of Moleskine's Pen+ and special sensor-laden paper.

To use the Smart Planner, you'll simply write in your appointments with your Pen+ as you would with any other paper planner. The Smart Writing system will then read what you've written and sync it to your calendar of choice automatically. There will also be a notes section of the planner which will, should you choose to utilize it, sync with the Moleskine Notes app.

There is a bit of a catch, however. Currently the Pen+ isn't sold on its own - it's only available as part of Moleskine's Smart Writing Set. Therefore newcomers will have to invest in the set, which isn't exactly cheap at $197.95. If you already own Moleskine's Smart Writing system, however, the planner alone will only set you back $29 once it's released worldwide on Sept. 12. If you're hesitant to take the plunge, it's worth considering that the Smart Planner will be the only one currently on the market able to sync with your iCloud Calendar.

For nerds like me who are interested in the layout of the planner itself, it will be organized in a weekly format with a section for each of the seven days on the lefthand page. The righthand page for each week will be dedicated exclusively to note-taking.

As an extremely picky agenda enthusiast and avid handwriter, I'm interested to see what doors the Smart Planner opens for people who often find themselves swimming against the tide re: digital calendars. Unfortunately, there isn't a preorder option just yet - we'll update with a link as soon as it's available. Until then, I'll be clutching my trusty paper planner to my chest and waiting.

Thoughts? Questions?

If you're an old-fashioned paper agenda user, do you think the Smart Planner will help usher you into the world of digital calendars? If you already use the Smart Writing system, will you add the Smart Planner to your collection? Let us know in the comments or send us a tweet!

Whenever the inspiration strikes, Bear makes it possible for you to write down your prose on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. It's got a beautiful interface, a lot of great features, and you can download it for free (though some of the advanced features will cost ya).

If you're interested in finding out more about Bear, we've got every thing you need to know right here.

What's new with Bear?

Bear recently received an update that includes the ability to sketch on a note. Plus, it now has custom icons, iMessage stickers, and VoiceOver support.

What is Bear?

It's a large furry mammal that mostly lives in mountainous regions ... Just kidding. Bear, in reference to iOS and macOS, is a note-taking app that lets you control how your note-taking experience looks and feels. It's got dozens of features that give writers a lot of flexibility, including basic note-taking, checklists, and support for Markdown. You can select a variety of different themes if you need the extra inspiration (it's like writing your thesis draft in different colors of pens), and you can make a lot of minor adjustments within each document to get the right look for your work.

How do I get the app?

Bear is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac for free. It comes with a plethora of features in the base version, but you can add a whole lot more with a monthly subscription (which covers all your devices) of $1.49 per month or $14.99 per year.

• iPhone and iPad - Download now
• Mac - Download now

So, what are these cool features Bear has?

From the developer website:

• Advanced Markup Editor that supports and highlights over 20 programming languages
• Rich previews while writing so you see prose, not code
• In-line support for images and photos
• Use Cross-Note Links to build a body of work, quickly reference other notes, and more
• Quickly add todos to individual notes to keep yourself on task
• Multiple themes to offer a style for everyone [subscription only]
• Multiple export options including HTML, PDF, DOCX, MD, JPG, and more [subscription only]
• Smart Data Recognition of elements like links, emails, addresses, colors, and more to come
• Hashtags to quickly find and organize notes however you like
• One-tap formatting on iPhone and iPad with a custom shortcut bar
• Focus Mode hides notes and other options when it matters
• All your notes are stored in plain text for the ultimate in portability
• Effortless, secure, and private multi-device sync via iCloud [subscription only]
• Regular updates to keep you and your writing current

OK, so which of those features do I have to pay for?

Only three of them, actually. They are three very important ones, but you could work without them if you don't want to support a hard-working indie developer (#guilttrip).

• Syncing in iCloud between all of your devices for one low price
• Document exporting with support for HTML, PDF, DOCX, MD, JPEG, and more
• All those great themes! The free base app comes with two (white with red or white with blue) themes, but the others are unlocked with your subscription.

How do I switch to Markdown mode?

If you're writing for the web, you're probably a heavy Markdown user. Bear supports Markdown code and shows you the final look as you type. H2 and bullet points have never looked so good.

To enable Markdown support, select the Settings icon in the Sidebar (the furthest section on the left), it looks like three slider bars stacked on top of each other. Then select General. Then toggle the Markdown compatibility Mode switch on.

I can't figure out how to create folders for my notes

It isn't obvious, but it is incredibly easy once you know how. Just type a hashtag and the name you want your folder to be (#work, for example). Once you type that hashtag anywhere in the note, it will automatically create a folder in the Sidebar and organize the note into it. You can even use more than one hashtag and organize notes into multiple folders at the same time. For example, you could put a note into your #school folder, and also into your #history folder.

I heard you can link one note to another, how do I do that?

You sure can! While in a note, you can copy the link to the note. Then, when you go into another note, you can paste it. It will automatically create a really nice-looking link, too.

• On Mac: Right- or Control-click a note in the Note List, then choose Copy Link.
• On iPhone and iPad: Swipe right on a note in the Note List, then tap More, then tap Copy Link.

Then, go into whatever note which you want to link, highlight the text you want to create the link in association with, and paste it the way you normally would on iOS or Mac. It automatically creates a hypertext link.

You can also use double brackets and include the name of the note, like this: [[Note Example]] and automatically create a link (no need to copy or paste anything).

How do I do a to-do list?

One nice thing about Bear is that you can write a novel, take a quick note, or build a to-do list, all in the same app.

On iPhone and iPad, you can turn a note into a checklist by tapping the Checkbox icon in the keyboard toolbar. On Mac, Select the Pen icon on the far right of the app window, and then click the Checkbox icon.

Then, start writing your note. It will automatically turn into a to-do list, complete with boxes you can check when you've completed an item (oh, that sweet, sweet, strikethrough).

I can't save my notes? There's no save button!

You are correct that there is no save button, but actually all of your work is saved automatically, in real time. That's right. Every single letter that you type is already saved. Go ahead, try it. Close the app. When you open it, your note will be there, exactly as you left it.

How do I get those cute iMessage stickers?

They're already in your App Drawer in the Messages app on your iPhone. Open Messages and tap the App Drawer (it looks like an "A" made out of writing tools). Then, tap your app list icon in the bottom left of the screen (it looks like four ovals). Then, swipe between your app pages until you find the Bear Stickers icon. Tap it to open the sticker options and share your Bears with the world.

Any questions?

Do you have any questions about Bear for iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Put them in the comments and we'll help you out.

The Mac is a great tool for writers, with a plethora of software available for any kind of writing. It doesn't matter if you're a student spending long nights on your big paper, a journalist writing up your latest scoop, or a novelist furiously typing away on your next opus — there's an app for you on the Mac.

• Ulysses
• Byword
• iA Writer
• Scrivener
• Blogo
• Bear
• Pages

Ulysses

Ulysses offers a full array of tools for writers of any kind. This app is easy to pick up and start using but offers a wide array of customization options for everything from writing to exporting. Choose to work in Markdown or create your own markup style. With Ulysses, you can also create your own writing environment with everything from background colors to fonts. When it comes time to publish, you can export your work in a variety of formats, including plain text, DOCX, and ePub. You can also publish your work to WordPress sites and Medium.

Your projects all sync with iCloud between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with Dropbox support also available. The app also recently added support for Touch ID to keep your documents safe.

• $44.99 - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, $24.99 - Download Now

Byword

"Simple but effective" is the best way to describe Byword. With this Markdown-focused writing app, you start with a blank document and just write. It's a minimalist app with only a few settings to fuss with, and Byword really only cares about getting you writing. Your documents sync between Mac, iPhone, and iPad using iCloud Drive, though you can also store them in Dropbox.

When it comes to publishing, you've got options for PDF and HTML. You can also post what you've written to blogging services such as Medium, WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger, or you could send your document to Evernote.

• $11.99 - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, $5.99 - Download Now

iA Writer

iA Writer's gone through quite a few changes over the years. Where the previous Pro app tried to break down your writing into a flow between notes and writing and editing, the modern iA Writer focuses on having your write in plain text, with full Markdown support. That's not to say that there aren't advanced features, however, as there are quite a few. Syntax Control breaks down your writing to show you the structure, highlighting adjectives, nouns, conjunctions, and more. Link to other documents in iA Writer to combine them into a single project, or link to images or spreadsheet files to see them in iA Writer's Preview screen in a number of different templates.

Like other apps on this list, iA Writer lets you publish to blogs, in this case, WordPress and Medium. You can also export your work in Markdown, PDF, HTML, and Microsoft Word.

• $9.99 - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, $3.99 - Download Now

Scrivener

Scrivener is nothing short of a full-featured suite of tools for writers. Novels, scripts, essays, research papers, it doesn't matter, because Scrivener supports all of them. Organize your ideas on digital notecards and lay them out on the corkboard to see how your work fits together. Import images, PDF and other media you've used as research to refer to it later. Keep your work segmented for easier organization and edition, while maintaining its structure with the Binder. And each part of the app can be customized to create the exact writing environment that you need. It's actually hard to encapsulate just how many options Scrivener gives you.

When you're done, compile your project into a single document, and export in formats like DOC, rich text, PDF, ePub, Kindle, and even export for other apps like Final Draft. Away from your Mac? You can also check out Scrivener for iPhone and iPad, which lets you work on your Scrivener projects no matter where you are.

• $44.99 - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, $19.99 - Download Now

Blogo

Blogo is a standout amongst our selections here because while many of these apps allow you to publish to the web, that's Blogo's explicit purpose. Open up Blogo and sign in to your WordPress, Blogger, or Medium account and start writing those hot takes. Manage everything from your post's title to its tags, preview your posts, and images. Write in Markdown or rich text, insert inline HTML and code blocks, and keep track of your writing goals. You can also perform some basic photo editing, cropping and resizing photos, and even adding effects and filters.

While Blogo is free up front, you can subscribe to Blogo Pro for $2.99 per month (or $24.99 for a year) to get access to more advanced features. You'll be able to add as many accounts as you want, get access to the Media Search feature to easily find videos, images, GIFs, and more, and on certain accounts, you can even moderate and reply to comments.

• Free - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, Free - Download Now

Bear

A relatively new app compared to the rest of the list, Bear might seem simple, but it offers a great deal of flexibility for handling text. It's true that Bear is good for both notes and todo checklists, but it's support for Markdown, a variety of themes, and simple organization makes it a great tool for many different kinds of writing. Add images, files, code blocks, and more to spice up your work and give it more context.

In terms of options, you've got few. Choose how to sort your documents, pick a theme, pick your font, and even control fine-grain details such as font size, line height and width, and paragraph spacing. Subscribe to Bear Pro for $1.49 per month in order to sync your documents between Bear for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

• Free - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, Free - Download Now

Pages

Apple's own writing app, Pages lets you create all sorts of documents. There are more than 60 templates in Pages, covering just about every kind of writing, from short essays to research papers. There are even templates for items like business cards and flyers. You can add images and shapes, layout your documents in different styles, and more. You can also secure documents with Touch ID if you have one of Apple's 2016 MacBook Pros with Touch Bar.

Pages also makes it easy to collaborate with other people. Multiple people, whether they're on macOS, iOS, or even Windows thanks to iCloud.com, can collaborate on a document at the same time. You can share collaborative documents publicly or with specific users, see who is in the document at any given time, and follow their cursors as they edit the project.

• Free ($19.99 for pre-October 2014 Macs) - Download Now

See also:

• iPhone and iPad, Free ($9.99 for pre-September 2014 iOS devices) - Download Now

Your favorites?

What is your writing app of choice on your Mac? Do you use one of these or something else? Let us know in the comments.

Vesper, the notes app by Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber, will be shutting down in the very near future. The reason, when you cut to it, is simple: Vesper didn't make enough money to support its ongoing development.

Brent Simmons, writing at inessential:

John Gruber, writing on Daring Fireball:

iOS 7, in addition to looking all-new, introduced new architectural features like size classes. In the pre-iOS 7 era, building an iPad app was like building a second app. You could bundle it together with the iPhone version in a universal binary, but from a developer's perspective it was nearly twice the work. If we had started with iOS 7, we might been able to natively support the iPad from day one on iOS, so the actual schedule might have looked like this:

• Build Vesper for Mac. Sell it for around $20.
• Build a sync system.
• Build Vesper for iOS 7, with native support for iPhone and iPad.
• Maybe build a web version.

I'm a firm believer that you always need some good luck to succeed. We would have been luckier, timing-wise, if we had done the Mac app first, because we would have been able to build the iOS version for iOS 7 right from the start.

I used Vesper a lot. I enjoyed its style and sensibilities. I'm sad to see it go, both as an app and as an indicator of how hard it is to thrive with indie apps.

Apple Notes doesn't have the same aesthetic, but its ubiquity makes it an easy go-to if you're looking for a replacement.

Meet Scrivener, your new writing companion. It's an app that will aid you from your initial idea to the final full stop of a draft, and is a neat concept that enables you to unleash your creativity without worrying exactly where they fit in your worded world. A variety of tools and features are available to enable you to outline all details or complete a rough draft for future restructuring.

Think of Scrivener as an immensely powerful word processor come writing guide. Here are a handful of highlighted features:

Get Started

• Interactive tutorial project
• Keep each manuscript and supporting materials in a self-contained project
• Import Word, RTF, Final Draft and plain text files
• Easily split imported text into separate sections

Get Writing

• Write your manuscript in sections of any size
• View all sections as a single text using the "Draft Navigator" (iPad only)
• Quickly navigate sections using the "binder" sidebar
• Format with fonts and presets
• Comments, footnotes, links and highlights
• Simple bullets and lists
• Insert images
• Pinch-zoom to resize text
• Full-screen mode (iPad only)
• Typewriter scrolling mode keeps typed text center-screen (iPad only)
• Write a screenplay using scriptwriting mode
• Live word and character counts
• Set word and character count targets
• Find and replace
• Customizable keyboard row provides quick-access buttons for formatting, navigation and punctuation
• Comprehensive keyboard shortcuts for external keyboard users

Find Your Structure

• Write in any order and reorganize later
• Write a synopsis for any text section and see it in the outline
• Expand, collapse and drill down into sections of your project
• Rearrange sections as index cards on the corkboard (iPad only)
• Project-wide search
• Track ideas using labels and status
• Apply custom icons to your sections

Refer to Research

• Import research material such as image, PDF and media flies
• View research files or other sections right alongside your writing (iPad only)
• Every section has its own notes area for jotting down ideas
• Supports multi-tasking split screen mode (supported devices only)

Share Your Work

• Compile to a single document for sharing or printing
• Use different formatting in your exported or printed document
• Export to Word, RTF, Final Draft, PDF or plain text
• Convert rich text to Markdown for sharing with Markdown apps
• Create and email zipped backups of your projects

Work Anywhere

• Use Dropbox to sync between devices and with the macOS and Windows versions of Scrivener*
• Copy projects between devices via iTunes

Should you wish to try something out that's a little bit more functional and tailored to creative writing than say Word, be sure to give Scrivener a try. Do note the pricey listing, but it's certainly worth the investment.

• $19.99 - Download Now

BBEdit, the versatile text editor for Mac from Bare Bones Software, has hit version 11.6, adding support for Kite for checking your code, along with a brand new trial model.

With Kite support, BBEdit can now check your code while you edit. Kite offers code completion and error correction, and will even suggest documentation. BBEdit is the first third-party application with built-in Kite support.

BBEdit 11.6 also brings with it a new model for trials. Going forward, you'll be able to use all of BBEdit's features for free for the first 30 days. After that, you can still use the app's editing features, though you'll need to pay to access the web authoring tools and other features.

In addition to these changes, BBEdit 11.6 comes packed with over 100 updates, including new features, enhancements, and fixes. Improvements have been made across the app, from the look and feel to the Find Differences feature. As a reminder, you'll need OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 or later in order to run the latest version of BBEdit.

You can get BBEdit 11.6 directly from Bare Bones Software right now.

• $49.99 - Download Now

Ergonis Software have released the latest version of their text expansion software, Typinator, making it easier for those using TextExpander to switch over, while also adding new features both current and news users will enjoy. The app can now import from TextExpander's "textexpandersettings" format to bring your snippets into Typinator with minimal effort.

From Ergonis:

Ergonis is also offering a 25% discount to those that purchase Typinator in April 2016 if they use the code TE1604P at checkout. That brings down the price to about $18.75 for new customers. Additionally, all Typinator purchases made from this point forward will be eligible for a free upgrade to Typinator 7 when it launches later this year.

You can grab Typinator now directly from Ergonis Software.

• $24.99 - Download Now

Medium has introduced Collections, an easier way for you to find coverage on specific topics. Collections are the home for topic and theme-based content, bringing together the best Medium stories on specific topics. Whether you want to keep up on the Oscars, or Apple's battle with the FBI, you can now do so with ease.

From Medium:

You can grab the latest Medium update from the App Store now.

• Free - Download now

Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 11.5, bringing a number of improvements, refinements, and fixes to the text editor, including changes to Find Differences and some of the appearance controls. BBEdit 11.5 also adds support for iCloud Drive.

There are some new features that have been added to BBEdit's Find Differences feature. When comparing two documents, Synchro Scrolling is on by default, which scrolls one document when you scroll the other. You now also have new appearance options for Find Differences, including new Text Colors options, which determine how differences are highlighted in in editing views.

With iCloud Drive support, BBEdit users now have an alternate method to Dropbox for syncing application support and setup information between Macs. You'll need to create an 'Application Support' folder, and a BBEdit folder within that, inside iCloud Drive in order to take advantage of this support. BBEdit 11.5 can also use iCloud Drive to host a shared backup folder, which the app will use if you create a 'BBEdit Backups' folder in iCloud Drive and turn on BBEdit's Historical Backups option.

For more on what's new in BBEdit 11.5, you can head over to Bare Bones Software, where you'll also be able to download this latest update.

• $49.99 - Download Now

Moleskine's Timepage is a new calendar app for your iPhone and Apple Watch. Presenting your schedule as a continuous timeline, Timepage connects to iCloud, Google, and Exchange calendars. To view a particular day, just tap that day on the timeline to get more details, including the weather. On the Apple Watch, just swipe through to see your schedule for the next five days.

Speaking of the weather, Timepage has a unique way to view your forecast. At the bottom of a day's page, tap and hold the weather to get more detailed information. Drag your finger across the stream to see the temperature and conditions for the rest of the day. You can also swipe to the right in the timeline view to see the day's low, high, and chance of precipitation.

There are some customization options in Timepage. You can select your default calendar, how often you want to receive alerts for events, and whether the app badge displays the number of remaining events or the day's date. You can also select your timeline color, which will be reflected on the Apple Watch as well.

Moleskine Timepage is available from the App Store now.

• $4.99 - Download Now

BBEdit's a powerful tool for Mac-based app and web developers. The latest release makes it even better. What's more, it's a recommended download for current users.

Other improvements include a new CSS/SCSS language module, Arrange submenu and Save All In Window command. There's more besides.

Git is a powerful distributed revision control system used by developers. Michael Tsai, developer of the popular SpamSieve anti-spam software for Mac, explained why having the new Git menu in BBEdit is so handy.

• $49.99 - Download now

Ulysses has long been a staple on the Mac, especially when it comes to long form writing, and today Ulysses comes to the iPad. I've been using Ulysses exclusively on my iPad Air 2 for the past week in the place of my regular text editing app. Complete with iCloud sync, Markdown support, and a beautiful 3 pane interface, Ulysses feels right at home on the iPad.

The good

• Lots of export options including ePub, HTML, PDF, and plain text
• Supports iCloud Drive and iCloud sync
• Great keyboard shortcut support (physical hardware keyboards)
• Shortcut bar is functional and has everything you need
• Markdown support is extensive
• Three paned view lets you easily drill down and back out of files
• Offers tons of versatility and organization options
• Ulysses for Mac also updated with brand new look and Yosemite design

The bad

• iCloud sync is a little finicky, hopefully that'll be addressed quickly

Writing on iPads with the help of a good keyboard case is becoming more and more common. There's nothing better than carrying only an iPad under my arm to the coffee shop and hammering out a ton of writing. The iPad creates a distraction free writing environment that I can control. It's what I love about it.

Quite recently I started work on my first iBook. I quickly found myself realizing that my current go-to Markdown app for iPad — Byword for those curious — wasn't going to cut it. I couldn't sort and organize my thoughts in any logical way. This is the problem I kept running into with many Markdown apps that supported both Mac and iPad.

I had used Ulysses on my Mac in the past and found it to be the most logical solution for long form writing for many reasons, the main one being that the hierarchy and organizational structure was easy to use and just made sense. So I started my book there. And like an animal, I wrote chapters on my iPad in Byword and then pasted them in Ulysses, which is where my thought process lived.

Enter Ulysses for iPad.

The iPad version brings the same Markdown and formatting support its older Mac sibling offers. My favorite feature of Ulysses for Mac is the three paned layout because of how easy it makes finding and navigating through documents. I was happy to see this same functionality was brought to the iPad version. Just swipe left or right off the side of the screen to drill in and out of documents.

Ulysses for iPad also supports keyboard shortcuts if you're using a paired keyboard. I have yet to find one that I couldn't use. For example, you can hit command + n on your keyboard case in order to quickly start a brand new document in your current directory, just like you can on the Mac version. Obviously whatever keyboard case you're using has to support these functions. If it does, you'll be good to go with Ulysses.

The shortcut bar in Ulysses for iPad either appears above the on-screen keyboard or along the bottom of the screen if you're using an external keyboard. You have access to all the most common shortcuts you may want to use, both regular text formatting and Markdown. In terms of Markdown support, Ulysses makes a quick job of inserting any kind of media you'd need, from links to videos and images. Tapping on the character count in the quick bar gives you even more details about what you've typed — word, character, sentence, etc. Tapping on any of them lets you toggle which statistic you see in the quick bar.

I want to talk for a second about iCloud sync as well. Prior to Ulysses for iPad, Ulysses for Mac worked fairly well with Daedalus Touch. You can continue to use that syncing ecosystem if you choose, or use both. I will note that iCloud sync with Ulysses is currently a little odd at times. For example, sometimes I create a file on iPad and it doesn't seem to want to sync without a hard restart of the app. I've experienced the same behavior on the Mac as well. Anyone who uses iCloud sync regularly may be made slightly nervous by this, and rightly so. Hopefully these things can easily and quickly be addressed with an update.

Good news for current Ulysses for Mac users too. The Mac version has also been updated to version 2.0 and brings with it an all new look for Yosemite, a beautiful new dark mode, and tons more. Ulysses on the Mac was a great writing experience before. Now it's an even better one.

The bottom line

I've been on the hunt for a text editor that does it all for a long time. Elaborating further, these are the features I've long desired in a writing app:

• Native support for both iPad and Mac
• Good sync support (Dropbox or iCloud)
• Markdown support
• Support for external keyboard shortcuts for iPad
• An organizational structure that lets me get and stay organized
• Makes sense for short tasks and for long form writing

Ulysses as a whole checks off almost every box on my list. Ulysses for iPad and Mac let me write how I need to and both adapt to suit my needs, not the other way around. That's far more important to me than having every single feature possible jammed into a text editing app.

If you're looking for a text editor for iPad that can evolve as your writing needs do, give Ulysses for iPad a try. You'll be glad you did.

• $19.99 - Download Now
• $44.99 - Ulysses for Mac - Download Now

Vesper — the thought-collection app by Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber — has been updated to support Apple's new adaptive interface frameworks. And yes, that means Vesper now lets you note and tag in landscape on you iPhone and on your iPad.

If all you've ever made are brief reminders or lists, the additional space might not mean much to you. It lets you use the landscape keyboard, which some prefer, but text benefits from the large screen mostly when you enter a lot of it. So, I expect those that use Vesper to collect not only thoughts but drafts will be happiest with the new, wider options.

Big screen notes and images are one only one aspect of the change, however. Being able to have all your notes follow you from iPhone to iPad — thanks to Vesper sync — is another. It makes a useful yet dedicated place to keep your thoughts into a universal place to store and access them.

Also new, standard Share sheet support, so you can send your Vesper notes to any app that supports Share extensions, and do anything to them that available as an action extension.

I've been using the new version of Vesper since it went into beta and the transition really has been pulled off with the usual Q Branch minimalism and elegance. Typing on my iPad is still a joy, and typing into Vesper that way is joyous.

That said, I'm not sure how much I'll use the new modes for text entry. The biggest plus for me is availability.

The newly universal version of Vesper is a free update for existing customers and is currently available on sale for $7.99 for new customers.

John Gruber, writing about the new pricing on Daring Fireball:

You can also read about why they went iPad instead of the previously announced Mac app at the Vesper blog.

• $7.99 on sale - Download now

Disclosure: I co-host a podcast with Dave Wiskus so check other reviews and get a well-rounded sense of the app if you're at all unsure about it.

Ginger Labs' Notability is one of the best note-taking apps for iOS thanks to the way it harmonizes writing, drawing and recording audio. Does the Mac version follow suit?

If you're a visual thinker, prone to doodling or sketching ideas using paper and pen, you owe it to yourself to check out Notability. It's easy to type with, easy to draw with, and easy to embed recordings with, making it a versatile and truly intuitive note taking app for the Mac.

Here's what you're presented with when you open Notability for the first time. A three-pane interface with a sidebar on the left showing you your notes and thumbnails associated with them, so you can figure out which note you want to open at a glance.

Notes are the basic mode of collecting thoughts, images and audio files together. Notes can be collected into subjects, with dividers used to differentiate them. So you can create a divider called "School," for example, with subjects for each class, perhaps, then individual notes for specific lectures or lessons.

The navigation bar gives you access to note taking tools including text editing, handwriting and highlighting markers, an eraser tool and a selection lasso and a marquee tool to select what's on the page.

The right side of the page is bordered with tool palettes specific to whatever input method you're handling at that point; text formatting options, pen and highlight colors and more.

Writing in Notability is a linear affair; position the cursor where you want, it'll flush left on the page. You can style text with different fonts and colors, add bold, italics and underline and select three different list styles: plain, bulleted and ordered (by number and letter if you use multiple indents; bullet lists change formatting as they indent as well). Text also reflows around images you've embedded in your notes.

The handwriting and highlighting tools should be familiar to Notability for iOS users; this is really where the app made its bones on the iPad and iPhone. Of course, handwriting and visual input isn't quite so straightforward on the Mac, but if you're lucky enough to be working with pen tablet (or skilled enough with a mouse), then you can combine your written notes with sketches, highlights to text and other visual embellishments.

Drawing and highlighting tools include a palette of 16 different colors, pen and highlighter width adjustment, and pen style (uniform, which paints an even line, and variable). The erase tool will step back actions you take using the highlighter and pen tools.

You can import images and PDF files, editing them using the pen and highlight tools. Pinch and zoom works as you'd expect it to. You can also import Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel content after a fashion (using Google Drive as a bridge), along with RTF files, and Note files.

Clicking the mic button attaches an audio file to the note, recorded from your Mac's microphone. You can start and stop recording at any time; each audio file is indexed. The files can be easily scrubbed during later playback, to make it easy to find that segment of the lecture or conversation you found particularly illuminating. You can slow down and speed up playback as well.

If you already use Notability on your iOS device, getting the Mac version is as close to a no-brainer as possible. Notability for the Mac integrates with iCloud to provide really seamless workflow with your iOS Notability data. Quite frankly, this is where Notability really shines: Taking notes, sketching and doodling on the iPad is effortless, then bringing it to the Mac to take further notes or edit what you've done is very simple, straightforward and intuitive.

Notability sports an "AutoBackup" feature that works with Dropbox and Google Drive, putting files in a new Notability folder. iCloud is also supported, and this makes it simple to sync Notability files between Mac, iPad and iPhone.

If you've already invested in the workflow of another note-taking tool for the Mac like Evernote or OneNote, adjusting to Notability may be more trouble than it's worth. But if you haven't had any luck finding a note app that you've been happy with, I strongly recommend giving Notability a try.

• $5.99 - Download now

PDF Office is a new application that lets you create and edit PDF documents on your iPad. You can also download and add documents from iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive.

You can use PDF Office to create a fillable PDF, making things like surveys, contracts, and time sheets. Your documents can contain information fields, drop-downs, checkboxes, and more. You can share your created documents through email, Dropbox, Box, and SkyDrive. PDF Office's flexible markup tools will let you highlight, stamp, hand-write notes, and more.

In addition to creating from scratch, you can also convert existing items into PDFs. Choose a document file, a web page, or an image. Use the app to save and markup receipts, and paper documents. Scanned documents can be turned into interactive PDF forms using PDF Office's automatic form field detection.

PDF Office is free to download and use in a limited capacity, with a subscription to unlock the full features of the app. It costs $4.99 per month, and $39.99. Anyone who has PDF Expert 5 installed within the first seven days of the PDF Office launch will get a free 1-year subscription.

• Free - Download Now

The developer behind Drafts, a popular time-shifting text app, was told by the App Store review team that he needed to remove their Today view widget from iOS's Notification Center due to the behavior of its buttons. It's one of a growing number of post-review rejections for Notification Center widgets that began with PCalc. Though Apple later reversed its PCalc decision, the company has continued to reexamine other widgets. So, what's going on... and why?

Extensibility, which includes Today view widgets, has been one of the biggest additions to iOS since the launch of the App Store. Unsurprisingly, it's why we're seeing something akin to the kind of growing pains first witnessed during the App Store's debut. When PCalc's Notification Center widget first faced rejection, I wrote about how the App Store works — specifically when it comes to the introduction of something as new and important as Extensibility. The TL;DR version is:

1. New technologies get introduced at WWDC.
2. Developers race to include them in their apps and get them submitted to the App Store prior to launch day.
3. Apple's software team races to get iOS shipped, the marketing team to get apps approved, and the services team to get approved apps featured for launch day.
4. After launch, apps that were approved (and even featured), but used iOS's new technologies in "unforeseen" ways, can eventually get looked at again within Apple.
5. Most of those apps fit with how the marketing and services team believe the technologies should be used, and stay approved. Some don't, however, and face post-approval rejection — in whole or in part. A smaller amount still result in the executive review board changing how the marketing and services teams believe the technology should be used.

I'm using terms like "marketing" and "services" instead of "Apple" here because referring to Apple as a singular entity makes it easy to forget the company is not a hive mind. There are different people from different orgs that have different perspectives and opinions. It's a human-driven system, which means there will be inconsistencies over time — but also improvements.

Sometimes this benefits us: Apple stops bad developers from doing bad things like stealing our contacts or conning us into buying fake apps. Sometimes it frustrates us: Apple stops smart developers from giving us a one-swipe-away calculator or a way to start a new draft.

In-between, we have a lot of turbulence. A lot of edge-cases and judgement calls. And a lot of frustration.

On the developer portal, Apple describes Today view widgets as a way to "provide quick updates or enable brief tasks". Examples included posting updates on package deliveries, or getting the latest surf reports or breaking news stories. In the programming guide, Apple describes widgets as way to 'give users quick access to information that's important right now". Examples there include checking current stock prices or weather conditions, or performing quicks task like marking a checklist item item as done.

Incredibly resource-constrained and severely limited for privacy and security reasons, developers were still able to get entire calculators in there, as well as games, keyboards, app launchers, and more. They were able to get a lot of things in there in part because those use-cases were unforeseen.

There's an argument to be made that if Apple was far more explicit about its policies up front, this wouldn't happen. Yet if there had been an explicit "no calculator widgets" at the start, James Thomson would never have made one. Maybe he would have lobbied for a change, and maybe we'd have gotten it eventually, but we wouldn't have had a PCalc widget as quickly as we did.

Likewise, if the letter of the law allowed for a widget type but its experience or content was antithetical to Apple's platform, it could result in other complications. ("Apple sued by contact-stealing app, developer claims no rules broken!").

There's also an argument to be made that these sorts of things should be settled faster — and settled internally — before any developer is ever contacted. Yet escalation doesn't scale, and appeal, by definition, can only happen after the fact.

I say all this not to excuse Apple, but to explain — not to claim the system is perfect, but that improving it will take some serious thinking and, likely, a lot of trial and error. (I've shared some of my own thoughts on this already.)

And that sucks for everyone, because it hurts everyone. Apple faces bad press and strained relations with developers, developers face uncertainty and unhappy customers, and customers lose features and get mad at developers and Apple.

Calculator widgets, unforeseen in the original iOS Notification Center plan, were ultimately allowed. Keyboards, which Apple expressly said couldn't be called, were ultimately not allowed to be independently implemented. What will happen with Drafts and buttons that send you to the app and initiate actions? We'll have to see. (I personally like it and find it useful, so I'm very much hoping it also gets approved.)

Over time, developers should get a clearer idea of what will and won't be approved, while Apple should see fewer and fewer "unforeseen" implementations. Like with apps, controversial rejections will become exceedingly rare.

And that, for better and for worse, is how the current system works.

Typed is a new text editor for the Mac from RealMac Software, the makers of RapidWeaver, Clear and Ember. If you're looking for a simple Mac text editor that will just get out of your way, give it a try.

Many of us largely take text editors for granted. Apple includes TextEdit with the Mac operating system, for example. And there are many others that are custom-built for programmers and web developers — my old standard, BBEdit, comes to mind. So you'd think that everything that can be done with a text editor has been done. But Typed proves that there's still some room left for imagination in this venerable app category.

The Mac is definitely my preferred medium for writing. I've written about this before — for my entire professional life, and much of my academic life, the Mac has been the one constant when it comes to how I write.

So it's terrific to find a text editor that puts the act of writing central, with everything else that might be a potential distraction off to the side.

Typed produces text that's HTML-readable thanks to built-in support for Markdown, the popular text formatting syntax system. If you're new to Markdown, a syntax guide is included in Typed's help. It only takes a few minutes to learn the basics. You'll be amazed at how much time you'll save compared to having to hammer out HTML-formatted text the old-fashioned way, or to mark it up manually using browser-based tools.

The UI in Typed is minimal to the point of being almost non-existent. When you first open it, you don't see any cluttered interface with a ruler or tools palette or anything else - just a blank page with a cursor and a pithy quote about writing. I do keep the character and word count options on, because I like to see how much I'm writing, but that's one of the few visual embellishments you find on the Typed page.

If you position the cursor in the left column, you'll see icons appear that provide font controls, a preview mode, and a share menu that lets you copy your content as HTML, send as an email, attach to an iMessage, AirDrop or any other Share menu-compatible extension (yes, Typed is written from the ground up to support OS X Yosemite, though Mavericks is the minimum system requirement).

The preview mode renders the text you've written with Typed with any relevant formatting you've added using Markdown code, so you can get a good estimation of what it's going to look like on the Web.

Typed has relatively sparse font controls — again, the point is to write, not to spend a lot of time laying out your document, which you can easily do by importing what you've written with Typed into another application.

You have a couple of serif fonts, a couple of non-serif fonts (including Helvetica Neue) and a couple of monospaced fonts to choose from, with three "themes" to choose from that affect page and type color: White with black text, sepia with brown text, or black with white text.

Typed's default "Responsive Layout" mode automatically resizes and reflows text based on the size of the window. You have general control over font size and line length by turning that feature off.

One of Typed's most unusual features is what's called "Zen Mode," which encourages you to focus on the page and the words. Zen Mode makes Typed go full-screen, with a translucent page background showing you a blurred version of your desktop. There's even an optional soundtrack you can use to further reduce distraction — it's six tracks of inoffensive new-agey sounding music, not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but it got the job done for me.

I've been using Typed for the most of the past week and I really enjoy the experience. Whether it's worth the money is another question; there are no shortage of text editors for the Mac ranging from free to much pricier. Typed has separated itself from the pack by very intentionally not packing itself full of features that many users won't touch, instead focusing of the pure writing experience as the core element to get right. Zen Mode is interesting, but the soundtrack business is a bit hokey, and without it it's little more than just Full Screen mode. It'll be interesting to see how RealMac expands Typed's feature set in the future without sacrificing what it gets right, which is helping you focus on the task at hand — getting words on the page.

You can try it for yourself for seven days by downloading a demo from RealMac's web site; they're also offering a special sale price this week of $19.99, $5 off the regular price of $24.99.

• $24.99, $19.99 on sale - Download now

Realmac Software has released RapidWeaver 6, the latest major version of their web design app. RapidWeaver now requires OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 or higher, and is completely ready for OS X Yosemite. A number of important new features have been added, like 64-bit support, site-wide code, and more.

New features abound in RapidWeaver 6. There are five new themes to choose from. These new themes are all responsive, and you can preview how your pages will look on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. While you can start building a new project immediately, RapidWeaver now comes with five example sites based on its new themes to get you started. An addon manager lets you keep track of all of your addons, as well as find new ones. RapidWeaver now also supports OS X's fullscreen mode.

The app now lets you write site-wide code, applying new and edited HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more across all of your pages. To go along with site-wide code, you can also create Master Styles, layouts that every page in a project will follow. The new Versions feature lets you browser previous versions of your project. The publishing engine has been completely re-written with smarter multi-file upload to FTP, FTPS, and SFTP servers.

RapidWeaver 6 is available in full for $89.99 from RealMac's website. Users upgrading from any previous version, even one purchased on the Mac App Store, and even going back to version 1.0, will need to pay $39.99 for the upgrade. RapidWeaver also has a free trial that lets you use the app for an unlimited amount of time, though it restricts you to three pages per project. Realmac has not yet submitted RapidWeaver 6 to the Mac App Store, but plans to do so at a later date, having built the app with the App Store in mind.

• $89.99 - Download Now

Ginger Labs has released Notability for Mac. The app allows you to take notes in a variety of ways, and syncs with the iOS apps via iCloud. Notability has been optimized for Mac, and includes functionality like keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop, and more.

Notability is a very flexible note taker. You can of course type notes, but also make audio recordings, annotate documents, and even write by hand. On the Mac, you can also drag and drop photos, outside audio recordings, and documents into your note. Scale and transform handwriting and sketches like you would images, rotating, cropping, and more.

In addition to syncing with iCloud, you can backup your notes using other service. Notability supports automatic backup to both Dropbox and Google Drive, so you never have to worry about your notes.

Notability is available in the Mac App Store for $9.99 right now.

• $9.99 - Download Now

Whether you're looking for a no-nonsense text input system or are looking for something to do transformations to big chunks of text-based data, a text editor fits the bill like nothing else. Bare Bones Software makes a terrific one called TextWrangler that ought to be a part of every discriminating Mac user's app arsenal. What's more, it's absolutely free.

Text editors serve important roles that word processors do not. While Pages, Microsoft Word and others may make your text look pretty and give you powerful layout tools besides, text editors specialize in actually doing things with text.

You can certainly create and edit readable documents with text editors, but that only scratches the surface. Text editors are indispensable tools for programmers who need to write source code and want to be able to highlight the code syntax to easily see what they're doing. System administrators depend on them to manage and edit system logs and configuration files and scripts. Anyone can use them to find and replace text, add editing and formatting, filter.

To that end, TextWrangler is chock full of useful features. It can read any file that contains plain text. It sports pattern-based search and replace — so you can look for a specific word, phrase or block of text, or you can use tokens and modifiers to find near matches to what you're looking for.

TextWrangler's search functionality is based on Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE), a common library for search functionality. So if you're familiar with the Unix grep function, you can create really complex search and replace patterns that can save you hours.

Beyond editing and manipulating strings of text, TextWrangler can manipulate entire files. You can merge the contents of a file into another one, for example. TextWrangler's support of system-level versioning makes it easy for you to track what you're doing, and it can auto-save files. It'll even save what you're doing if you quit the app or need to restart your Mac.

TextWrangler is built on the same underpinnings as Bare Bones' flagship software app, BBEdit. BBEdit costs money, though — it's available for $50 from the Mac App Store. The price tag gets you a whole ton of features you don't get with TextWrangler, especially if you're working with web documents — BBEdit has a complete set of HTML markup and editing tools, along with a clipping system, integrated support for version control systems like Perforce and Subversion, Automator workflows, the ability to read (and write) files stored in Zip archives, and much more.

The Bottom Line

If you're just getting started in Mac programming or Mac system administration and don't want to spend money on an industrial-strength text editor, TextWrangler is perfect for the job. Even if you're not a code monkey or an IT monkey, having a powerful text editor can save you a lot of time and work when it comes to searching and transforming text-based documents you might be working with.

• Free - Download now

If, for some reason, you're averse to downloading apps from the Mac App Store, TextWrangler is also available for download directly from Bare Bones' web site

Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the iOS and Mac App Stores. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Today we've got updates to a popular podcast app, an essential London travel app and a photo editor. Let's take a look!

New and updated iOS apps

• Pocket Casts: Since Shifty Jelly puts some real effort into its changelogs, I'm not spoiling it too much. Needless to say todays update adds some fixes and a new headphone control mode. Definitely check it out. $3.99 - Download Now
• Tube Map: One of the best London Underground apps around has had a major makeover as well as some great new premium features available through in-app purchase. Remains a must have for London commuters. Free - Download Now
• Fotor: Add text to your photos in lots of awesome fonts. Free - Download Now
• Phlo: New quick filter for searches, refresh button in the browser, behind-the-scenes redesign for better performanc. Phlo is now also free, with the Phlo Sync service available as an in-app purchase. Free - Download Now
• Diet Coda: The amazing code editor, FTP client, and all-around web dev app for iPad adds local files, Dropbox support, new syntax modes, and a lot more! $19.99 - Download now
• Frax HD: The fractal art program for iPad has been updated for 64-bit and given a makeover for iOS 7. $3.99 - Download now
• Textastic Code Editor for iPad: One of the best code, text, and markup editors for iPad a new, iOS 7-style look, new syntax definitions, themes, and more! $8.99 - Download now
• Google Translate: The iOS 7 redesign is here, as is handwriting support for a bunch more languages, including Arabic, Esperanto, Gujarati, Hebrew, Javanese, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Telugu, Zulu. Free - Download now

New and updated Mac apps

• Webcam Settings: The little app we use to make our podcast cameras work beyond their factory settings now lets you update profiles. $7.99 - Download now

More apps and updates?

If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!

Tag Journal is a new journaling app that not only lets you track text thoughts, but photos, voice recordings, and any other kind of memory you'd want. It also supports Markdown and the ability to edit images via Aviary. If you're looking for an all-in-one journaling and note taking app, Tag Journal may just be it.

On the surface Tag Journal looks just like any other journaling app but once you start using it, you realize it's actually much more. Tag Journal is laid out as a general timeline. Just add a post to your timeline in order to start typing. If you aren't ready to create an entry yet, use the Notes field to capture any loose thoughts you have for later.

You can create tags with Tag Journal so you can easily filter and find posts once you've started to accumulate a lot. Other features of Tag Journal include the ability to tag posts with locations, add photos to them, and obviously, convert them with Markdown. Tag Journal also features an export function that lets you turn any timeline event into a PDF or or HTML document immediately. Tag Journal also supports Facebook export too so you can easily share memories directly to your Facebook Timeline.

When adding photos with Tag Journal, one issue I did notice was that you can only access your Camera Roll. For me, this is a problem as I have a habit of dumping photos regularly and sorting them into albums and only re-syncing what I'd like. This is something I'd love to see addressed in a future update.

Tag Journal also lets you edit any photos you take or import using Aviary. Just hold down on an image in an entry in order to edit it. I'm not sure why you can't edit from the Gallery view but the only option that appears to be there is delete. The edit option in general isn't very obvious so that's another thing I'd like to see addressed in an update. Unless I read the user's guide, I never would have realized I could add special effects and filters to images right within Tag Journal. It's a great feature and it definitely should be more accessible.

The good

• Great interface that meshes nicely with iOS 7
• Support for all kinds of journal entry types including images, audio, and text, would be nice to see an independent video section added though
• iCloud sync so all your content is up to date between iPhone and iPad

The bad

• Photo edit feature isn't obvious at all, unless you know what you're looking for
• Adding tags is slightly daunting since you have to create an item before tapping into it and tagging it, I'd like to see the functionality available on the event creation screen as well

The bottom line

Tag Journal is a great journaling app that not only functions as a diary, but as a tool to track anything you want it to. It's one central location where you can store memories, notes, things you want to remember, and anything else you want. Aside from a few interface quirks, it's probably one of the best journaling apps available, and for those familiar with Markdown, definitely check it out, you'll be glad you did.

• $2.99 - Download Now

Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber join Guy and Rene to talk about their new app, Vesper, the value of ideas and collecting them, the art of collaboration, flat design, accessibility, testing, app pricing, and more. Also: Mad Men.

Here's the audio again, and for the first time, the complete transcript.

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Debug 15: Simmons, Wiskus, Gruber, and Vesper transcript

John Gruber: Brent, have you and I even spoken a word to each other since Çingleton?

Brent Simmons: No, I don't think we have. No, we were at Macworld.

John: That's right.

Brent: It's good to talk to you.

John: Isn't that an interesting fact? We've gotten from a handshake deal over a beer to a shipping app, and we've spoken voice-to-voice only at Macworld, where we spent about 10 seconds talking about Vesper.

Brent: Yeah, that sounds about right. It is amazing.

Guy English: I hope we're recording.

[laughter]

Dave Wiskus: And we're live.

Guy: Jackasses just jumped right into the good stuff.

John: I'm going to get a short guy to punch you in the nuts, Guy.

[laughter]

Guy: Why a short guy?

John: Didn't you watch the show last night?

Guy: Yes, that. Didn't I? You know I did, forgot about that.

John: That was a good episode.

Dave: That reminds me, John. Now we need to talk about branding.

John: It wasn't really a branding issue. What, the SC&P thing?

Dave: What I thought was interesting is that a company whose job is, I guess not brand, but market things, they can't handle their own image.

John: Right. That's obviously. It's clearly the...

[crosstalk]

Guy: The humor of it.

John: Right. Not even humor though. I think it's the foreboding.

Dave: I thought it was interesting. I kept expecting one of the characters to point that out, and nobody did. It seemed like that was completely acceptable.

John: It's supposed to be.

Guy: The thing is that nobody recognizes it, like they're so incapable of thinking about it in that way that nobody even brings it up.

John: The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Guy: [laughs] Was he going to talk about "Mad Men?"

Dave: Welcome to our "Mad Men" podcast.

Rene Ritchie: So a handshake deal at Çingleton, how did that start Brent?

Brent: Let's see. Some of the details are murky and lost to history, surely.

[laughter]

Guy: It's true. They're lost to the bottom of your glass, is what there lost to.

[laughter]

Brent: AKA history. The basic gist for me is I was looking for something to do besides what I was doing, my then current job. I was thinking it would be really fun to work with some other people.

Working with Dave and John sounded like the perfect power trio. We all have our different roles, and we could make something really awesome. It turns out, I was right about that.

Rene: Was that before or after the Rand's talk about developer, designer, and dictator at Çingleton?

Brent: It was before, but then hearing that, I'm like, "Yeah. Of course."

John: It was literally half.

Brent: Yeah.

John: We ended that meeting...

[crosstalk]

Brent: ...I think that's correct.

John: ...so that we could go to...

[crosstalk]

Brent: ...Yeah. That just immediately validated what we had put together, and that was very cool. We knew we were right on.

Then a little while after I ended up quitting the job I had and just saying, "You know, I'll just do this full time, because this is way fucking better." That's pretty much the story.

Rene: Did you just want to work together, or did you have an idea for an app? Which came first?

John: Brent seemed to have the idea when he came into Montreal. I don't think he quite said it in so many words, but it seemed like he came into Montreal wanting to pitch me and Dave, somehow foreseeing that the three of us would work well together.

He even said, "But I have no idea what it would be. What do you guys want to make?"

Brent: Yeah, I didn't have any specific app idea. I think I had talked to Dave about it a little bit beforehand. Boy, that's definitely lost at the bottom of a glass of something. I don't remember...

[crosstalk]

Dave: I remember that conversation. We were drinking. You had said, "It would be great to work on stuff, and it would be great to work on stuff with you and John." Of course I'm going to say yes to that.

Brent: Yes, of course.

Dave: I just assumed that after that it was forgotten. I think you had sent an email to John, but we had never really talked much about it. It wasn't until Çingleton that we actually discussed the idea.

Brent: Yeah.

Dave: The app idea itself was John's idea. I want to say you pitched it, John, to somebody else at Çingleton the previous year.

John: No, it was a long time before that. It wasn't even really a pitch. I showed it to Khoi Vinh years ago after Khoi left the "New York Times" and, I think, Marco Arment. Not quite like with Brent where Brent said, "Look I think the three of us should make an app."

It wasn't that type of thing. It was, "Look, I like you guys. You're my friends. I like your taste. What do you think about this idea?" If they had really bit on it then maybe one or the other of us would have worked on it together, but it just never went anywhere.

Then Khoi went on to make, what's it called, Mixel. I don't think Marco has done anything in the last...

Guy: Marco sold your idea already.

John: Right. [laughs] He sold Vesper.

Brent: Specifically, it was Justin, because Justin came to me after I had left my last job and he left his last job. He had come to me, and he had said there's this thing that John had mentioned to me. Would you want to do that as kind of a vanity project? Let's just see if we can do it, something to kill time.

So we started working on that. He had to duck out, and so I was left with some design work but nobody to work on the thing. When we were talking about doing an app, it seemed like a natural jump, to go back to that.

Guy: What form did he carry this idea around in, John? Was it just floating around in your head, or did you have...?

John: I'm going to bring it to WWDC next week. I actually have a notebook from 2009 where, I don't know, I've got about 20 or 25 pages of notes. Some of it surprisingly still works, and some of it was way, way different than what we ended up doing.

But the basic gist of it was exactly what we turned out. The basic gist was text notes and one master list of notes, like iTunes. iTunes is the model and the old iTunes, where it was just music, where you've got all music. I don't know what they called it. What did they call it? Library, I think.

But it just meant every single song in iTunes. Then playlists, but then instead of folders, where if you put something into a thing in a source list, then that's the only thing it's into. It would be tags so that it could be a -- what do you call that -- a one to many relationship. You know, one item could be in many different tags, and then just dragging up and down for priority.

That's just the basic idea. But what's funny is that Dave and...

So one thing I strongly believe in, I really do, is that ideas are not worth that much. Ideas are just, you know, I forget the old adage, but they're just a multiplier of hard work.

The idea itself is not worth that much, and you shouldn't really hang onto it. So I don't know, I had the idea, and I always thought it would be a good way to organize your stuff. I didn't keep the idea super-secret in the hopes that I would eventually work on a team that would build it.

I would just tell it to people if they ever asked me do you have any ideas for an app. That's what I did. I forgot about that, but I told Justin about it when Justin was looking for something.

Guy: I've heard you explain that idea before, too. You may even have said it publicly, like on stage someplace.

John: Right. There's no use worrying about ideas being all that precious because it's so far away from having an actual product. Again, the idea is still there. When I describe it in a little elevator pitch like that, that does sound like Vesper.

But what we actually have feels, I mean, a thousand times different than what I was thinking at the outset, and all for the better.

Guy: I mean, the idea is like let's build a car that drives really fast and handles really well, which is easy to say, but not so easy to do.

So what did you build? Like, how would you describe the difference between the idea and what you actually did?

Because I saw it come a long way, and it's really polished now.

John: I would say the single biggest difference between what I was thinking four years ago and what we've built is that I wasn't thinking of it as an iPhone app first. I was thinking of it as either a Mac app or a web app, but something that you would use on a big screen.

Doing it as an iPhone app fundamentally changes the nature of it. Changes the scope and really, really focuses you on minimalizing everything, because there's just not that much room on screen.

Brent: We talked about that, didn't we? I mean, when Justin and I were working on this, we started with a Mac version, and I did the iPhone design more or less on a whim because I had some extra time. When we sat down, we decided that iPhone made the most sense.

John: Yeah.

Guy: You had Jocket on a recent talk show, [laughs] and I was laughing because at one point, you specifically say that if you were starting a new product now, [laughs] you would do it for the iPhone, not even just iOS. Just focus on the iPhone first before the Mac or the iPad. [laughs]

John: Right. Jocket is on the Vesper beta, so when we recorded that, he already knew, and I did that really just to fuck with him.

[laughter]

John: Just to try to get him to screw up on air. He even told me after we stopped recording, he was like I almost lost it when you said that. I was like, "I didn't know what to say."

Guy: So why did you bother doing, John? So you had the idea. I don't know what directed by John Gruber means.

John: I had something written. I don't know. Maybe it'd be better for somebody else to answer.

Guy: Yeah, so that's a better question anyway. What were your respective roles?

Dave: I think of John as the other designer. I mean I know the whole thing was designer, developer, dictator and the credit is directed by, but I think of him as the other designer.

Guy: What, in terms of he'd do product design and you would sort of design the screens, kind of thing?

Dave: Well, I guess the gross over simplification is that I listen to John talk, and then I draw pictures, and I give the pictures to Brent, and he turns them into the software.

Guy: There's a feedback loop, right, I guess.

Brent: Right, right, and then it kind of goes back to one and we discuss everything, and we talk about what we like, what we don't like, and then the process kind of starts over again.

Guy: Well, Brent, I know that you're sort of a design-centric kind of a guy, yourself.

Brent: Yes, which I think helped a lot in working on this app, and, of course, I was part of the feedback process myself, but I would say Dave and John are obviously the designers on this. My hands were plenty full in just actually making their crazy shit work.

Dave: It reminds me of that Brad Ellis' talk at Çingleton where he had the different people at Pacific Helm, and they had like the graph of different people skills, and it's not that everybody has like this one specific thing.

It's more that there are lines that get drawn from here to here. I think it's very much true for us as well where we all had our hands a little bit in everything, but obviously we have our strengths and our weaknesses.

Brent: There's even a little bit of John code in there, as a matter of fact.

Dave: That's right, like one line.

Brent: But it's a big huge line.

John: One massive line.

Dave: So the part of the app that detects URLs, of course, is a regular expression that John wrote, and in fact at one point it had a bug which would hang up the app so he even had to debug it and rewrite that one line of code. It felt great assigning a ticket to John, by the way.

John: Then right before we submitted to the App Store, we can thank them by name. Nick Arnett? How do you pronounce his last name?

Dave: Arnott.

Brent: Armatour.

John: Armantour? It wouldn't be a podcast if I didn't mispronounce something. Well, Nick Arnott was doing QA for us and doing an unbelievably good job, but he found a bug in a way that it matches emails addresses, and I needed to change it.

There was a time when it looked like the last check-in was going to be mine before we submitted, but then we found something else. I thought that would have been pretty cool.

Dave: That would have been cool.

John: I also thought that Brent did something very clever with that, which I didn't even tell you, Brent, but I noticed it, because the thing I was least looking forward to. You took my regex and put it in, and I didn't knew how you did it. I never looked at the source.

Then when I went to fix this bug, and I knew the time was tight, and I was working on it. The thing I was dreading was all the double back-lashing of backslashes I would have to do to get this thing. This regex is seriously, like, it's humongous. It's like 500 characters all on one line.

But I have in it in a version. I have a thing. It's long story short, but I have it in a thing where it's all commented out in this nice long Pearl style regular expression where it's more like a programmer.

Each little bit of it is on its own line, and its indented, and it makes sense. Then I run a thing on it that turns it into a one-liner. But then that one-liner I thought, "I'm going to have to get in there and double backslash all the backslashes," which is a huge pain in the ass.

But then it ends up Brent has a little thing where it sits in the app, the regex, as a text file all by itself, and then he reads a text file into an NS string, and then it's used as the pattern so nothing has to be double back-slashed. It just gets to be used.

It's like Pearl where you can use regex just as a regex without ever having to worry about a string escaping it. Which is super clever and I thought super Brent, like nothing could be more Brent than something very easy like that.

Brent: Yes, well, I certainly didn't want to put in those backslashes, either, so I'm like, "There's an easy way to handle this...

John: Can I tell you the other thing I...

[crosstalk]

Brent: ...in a way that's likely to not have bugs.

John: The other thing I found out during that bug fix is that Brent Simmons indents his code like a [laughs] bum on the street.

[laughter]

John: There's spaces and tabs mixed together, and some of the lines, like, it all looks like it's eight spaces, but some of the lines have tabs, and then there's a line with seven spaces [laughs] . It's like what in the world is going on here?

Brent: Well, see, on my system it doesn't look like that at all. Everything is lined up. It's great. I don't know what's different about your X-code.

John: Mixing spaces and tabs, Brent Simmons? I mean my mind was blown.

Brent: I can explain that. Somewhere, there's some old code in here, and mostly new, but somewhere along the line X-code changed spaces instead of tabs. I've been like, "OK, I'll adjust to this new world."

But what it means is occasionally I've got some tab stuff mixed in with spaces stuff. So, whatever, I don't care that much. I care about apps that don't crash and that are awesome.

[laughter]

John: It's not like anybody has to read this stuff.

Brent: Yes.

John: I don't know. We all have our own OCDs. One of mine is always using tabs and having everything perfectly indented [inaudible 15:40] . Maybe that's why when I'm writing code, though, I write about three lines a day.

Guy: He's so meticulous.

Rene: This is why there's only one of each of us.

Guy: So how did you...? Go ahead.

John: Well, I just wanted to drop in an anecdote just to circle back to Brent's thing about our roles and the fact that...I mean nothing was really siloed. Obviously, I only wrote one line of code so we can't really say that I wrote much code.

But Dave would chirp in and Dave can spelunk around the code enough to change certain things, animations and timings, and stuff like that. He can do the math. So it's not like he never touched the code.

It's certainly, definitely, not the case that Brent never had input on the design, sometimes in really, really major ways. My favorite story of that is that Dave and I went back and forth privately about the way that in Vesper you swipe apps to archive them, and that this is like the equivalent of marking it, "Done," in a to-do app.

There are all sorts of ways that apps that have this notion of marking and item, "Done," do it. Sometimes they do a strike through. Sometimes they gray it out. Sometimes they'll make it jump to the bottom of the list. Sometime they'll just disappear. Who knows?

So we had this idea that when we talked ourselves into this that this was great, is that when you'd mark something done it would slowly fade out. As it faded out, then it would go away and then the item above and below would take up that space.

The idea was that as it faded out, if you wanted to change your mind you could do it again and bring it back before it disappeared And we spent a lot of time mocking this up and doing a really complicated...well, not complicated, but we did a lot of design work on it.

Dave: I had Animatics and everything.

John: Right, Animatics and everything, and it looked great. It really looked great. Then, when it came time to tackle that feature Brent put up on our Glassboard, immediately he just like, "This sounds like something I would want to have happen really, really fast, and so I just made it real fast."

Then we tried it, and we were like, "Oh, yeah. Why in the world would you want that to be slow? No matter how good it looks, that should be really, really fast."

It was typical Brent type thing. It was just a perfect example how Brent would have a huge impact on the design of the app just by being honest and saying what he likes. He was right. That's the sort of thing you do want to be fast.

Dave: There's something to be said for design literacy, too. Some developers you'll have to write long, detailed design specs to explain every pixel that's going to be changing on the screen. With Brent I could kind of just wave my hands and draw a picture, and he got it, which sped things up dramatically.

Brent: We also made this a whole lot easier with our settings thing where we had that big P list where you can go through and change how many pixels is this or what color is that. There's an awful lot of getting the cosmetics to match the specs that I didn't actually have to do. I could let Dave do it. That was a really, really big help.

John: In the future there will be religions based on that system.

Brent: Yes, yes indeed. And there should be. That helped take a lot off my plate so Dave isn't like, "Brent, move that two pixels" and I'd be like, "Gosh, OK, I'll move that two pixels." No, Dave could move it two pixels.

Dave: I honestly think that if not for that system and we had to keep putting in tickets every time we wanted something moved by a pixel, I'm pretty sure we would have hated each other by the time we were done.

Brent: Yeah, of course. It would have been all nitpicks all the time.

Dave: Right. This saved a ton of time and our friendship.

Guy: So that's the kind of thing that's pretty common in games. The content is separate. It's basically data, the layer rather. Can you explain exactly how this P list works so the listeners can get the religion?

John: Basically it's a big P list with everything that would be defined in the code, the margins for something or the colors for something. The colors would be a Hex string as you would use in HTML. I can define all kinds of margins, insets, you name it.

Brent: Loosely it's CSS for app layout in broad terms.

Dave: I don't know if we still have any, but at one point we even had some of that magic auto layout constraints. We even had some of that in there at some point.

Brent: We still do, I think, for like the polar refresh and things like that.

John: Yeah, any kind of number or string or bullion. There were a lot of cases where we wanted to try this design and try that design. There might be a bullion to toggle something on and off. For instance, in early builds the tags would appear in the timeline, not just in the detail view.

I think we may have had a bullion for would the tags appear in the timeline or not so we could easily try those things. All of us would pull from the repository and build on our own machines. We could ourselves try these different combinations.

Dave: We were smart enough to recognize early on that there would be design decisions that we wouldn't have strong feelings on until we saw it live. Brent was smart enough to build a system where we could just flip a light switch and decide which one we like better.

John: There comes a point where you're working with friends, and hopefully everybody is working with people who they like, none of us are sociopathic, that we don't care. But you do, even if you tell yourself that the work comes first and you don't want to compromise on the work just for the sake of being nice.

There comes a point where you really feel like you're badgering. Well, in this case it would Brent specifically because I know I told you I wanted five pixels of space underneath the tags, but now that I've seen it, I don't like it. I know I wanted some, but I think three is the better number. Now make one with three and let me see it.

If you know that you're interrupting Brent while he's doing something else, then you might just say, "Eh, I'll file it away for later, and I'll live with five for now." Whereas with the system we have, Dave and I would just change it to three and see if we liked it better and go.

It was try everything. If the retina pixel resolution, me worrying about whether the radius on the thumbnail images should be two PX or three PX, which is what, like one PX or one and a half pixels at non retina resolution.

We could just play with it and do it both ways, go back and forth and sweat every detail like that without slowing Brent down by him being this build machine to let us change a pixel here.

Guy: How does it work in the code bank? You've got a class that just reads in these -- I don't know what you call them, settings?

Brent: Yeah, exactly. It's VS theme class, not that our app is theme-able, but it as a theme. Yeah, it just reads these things and I have methods like font for key, float for key, edge insets for key, that kind of thing.

John: I think the single largest grouping of tickets was the, "Hey, Brent, can I get a key for this?"

Brent: Yeah, for sure.

Guy: That's interesting, because that's reasonably easy to add and is a huge benefit to everybody. Way to go, Brent.

Brent: Well, thank you.

[laughter]

John: The traditional way might have been, "Well, the designers use Interface builder for all this stuff."

Brent: Yeah, but that...

John: That's how it works, right? But it really is. Our app is not really Interface Builder friendly. It's dynamic and complicated enough. I think we used IB on the credits view. Even them I'm still like smashing two nibs together and adding a scroll view underneath, all this kind of stuff.

Dave: We had to do two versions, one for the three and a half inch phone and one for the four inch phone.

John: Yeah, that's right.

Guy: Really? Of the credits?

John: Right. Well, we didn't have to. It was just easier for me if we did it.

Guy: Just the way that the additional credits lie off the end of the screen.

John: Right. It just happened to work out that for me I could do all of this stuff by editing a P list, but when it came down to laying things out in ZiB, it took three ZiBs to pull it off.

Guy: Right. How did you guys settle on the visual design of the app?

Brent: Blood, sweat, and tears.

[laughter]

Guy: Nobody wants to answer.

John: Nobody wants to be the first one to speak.

Dave: We had gone through a couple rounds of design based on the original stuff I had done over the previous summer with Justin. It was OK.

I still think it was shippable, but we felt like since we had some time before Brent was really going to be able to ramp up we thought, "Let's try a different path. Let's strip this down to nothing and only put back the pieces that we need to put back and see where we end up." We wound up really liking it.

Guy: Yeah, it's very effective. There is very little UI there. Was that design intent from the beginning?

John: I think for me the attraction was that as a designer, especially a visual designer, it's so easy to want to go heavy handed. Like when I'm doing contract work, a lot of my salesmanship in design is things like, "Look how crisp my lines are and how great these gradients look. Look at these lighting effects and shadows."

It was kind of a fun challenge to take a step back from that and say, "How can we make something that's good without using tricks?"

Rene: You have nowhere to hide. It's just your pure style at that point.

Dave: Right.

John: Now having any settings in 1.0 was clearly a constraint we imposed upon ourselves. Now were we dead set that no matter what we ran into we wouldn't add settings?

No, but it was definitely a goal.

The fact that we hit it is kind of amazing. By trying not to have any settings and really trying to stick with it, it meant that when we did get stuck on a design that could be...

Guy: Ambiguous?

John: Well, that you could move past if you added a setting. Then it's a cheat I think. Who knows whether we'll always not have settings. It forces you to do more work as the designer.

Guy: I agree. Our first two versions of Napkin don't have any settings. 1.2 which isn't out yet, we added a couple of settings just because. The stuff like interface noises, sometimes that's good feedback and sometimes that's just really annoying for people.

John: Right, that's one where I think if you have noises you almost have to have a checkbox or an on off switch in iOS to let people turn it off because it's so polarizing. There are some people that just get driven nuts, just crazy out of their minds by sounds.

Guy: Right. Like in our case we use a click noise when you connect an arrow to an item. It's not like we're a noisy app. We don't make a lot of noise every often, but occasionally we do something.

That's good if you're starting to learn how the app works, but it started to get annoying to people who do it every day. They just don't want clicks going on while they're listening to their iTunes or something.

I think it's good to get out of the gate without any settings and then add only those that you really require. So I think you guys are doing the right thing.

Brent: We have to learn from our users. Right? We could guess what they'll ask for, but we don't know.

Guy: Exactly. What were some of the things you thought? The escape hatch that might have been tempted to use a setting?

Dave: It seems like font size is the obvious one.

John: Font size is one, and we'll probably have to revisit that for accessibility reasons anyway, not just in terms of being able to tweak. Not like a, "Oh, should it be 17? Should it be 18?" but should it be way, way bigger for people with varying degrees of poor eyesight.

We had a design for a long time where the note headlines, I think you guys saw this, were in small caps. They're real small caps, like real true typographic small caps.

Our friends at Hoefler & Frere-Jones who make the font that we're using did a custom build system to get us a font where we could use this, because for programmatic reasons we couldn't just invoke the small caps the way you do on the map. We really needed separate fonts.

They bent over backwards for us. I love the way it looks. I still do, but clearly was sort of like sounds in the interface. It wasn't going to work for everybody. I don't regret changing it. I think it was the right thing to do for 1.0. We still use semi-bold for the title to make it stand out, but it's just upper and lower case like you would expect.

Brent: I'm convinced that as soon as we add settings John is going to ask for small caps.

[laughter]

John: Definitely. That's our first setting right at the top.

Rene: Do you ever get the sense that you're offsetting choices to users just because you couldn't be bothered to come up with them? All the stuff that you're doing here you made your opinion in terms of how you wanted it to be used.

John: Yeah, definitely. A lot of stuff changed over the last month through having an active and really, really smart group of testers. I'm sure that after we release it it's going to change a lot in the next month or two months after we've been out in the field based on real people using it.

I'm sure there are tons of people who are going to run into things and think of things that none of us happened before. That happens to every app.

Dave: That's the difference between art and design. With art we would sit around thinking up what we think is the best way, and we would do all those things and just put it out into the world.

We have to think about what people are really going to do with this thing, and we have to listen to that feedback and start incorporating that into our workflow and we envision the product.

Rene: Also by not having settings you don't get into a situation where you can have Dave's way of doing something and John's way of doing something. You're forced as a group to make a decision for the app.

John: Right. We're the caretakers, I think. It is our job to make these decisions. We should make them informed, but ultimately we need to make as many of the decisions as we possibly can.

Guy: Yeah, having been involved in that process you guys were remarkably fast. You had like daily builds and something pretty big would change pretty day, always addressing the feedback from a lot of really smart people in the beta group.

John: That's Brent, that's all Brent. We would hand things off to Brent saying, "Here are the things we want to change," and they just happened. It's incredible.

Dave: You would close tickets before you opened them sometimes. I think the...

[crosstalk]

Brent: That's true, because I would close bugs that they never got to see. Right?

Dave: There were, I think, at least a couple of feature requests where there's maybe five minutes between somebody posting the Glassboard for it and...like they'd post a blast and within five minutes we would have decided that's a good idea and Brent would have closed the ticket.

[laughter]

Rene: [laughs] That was really interesting. You used one of Brent's products to basically run the extended Beta test for the product you were designing. It seemed to work really well as someone using it at least.

John: We used Glassboard a lot internally, too. That's our primary means of communication. We were joking before we got on the air that I've only spoken to Brent by voice once since we started this product, once meaning the couple of days we were in San Francisco for Mac World together.

We had almost no voice contact. I think I called Dave one time. I was out like on my phone. Remember? I made like one phone call to you, Dave.

Dave: I don't remember you ever calling me.

John: It was quick. It was like 30 seconds. It was like, "Should we do a build or not?" It wasn't even consequential. It was just easier for me to call you than to text it all out. We've had almost no voice contact and maybe a couple dozen emails for things that really make sense to email.

Things like, I don't even know what, but certain longer things where it's easier to do it in email than anything else. I don't think more than two dozen emails total.

Brent: Oh, we hate email.

Dave: Not even that.

John: Yeah, probably less. Everything else was Glassboard for the team and then me and Dave sending probably thousands of instant messages. It was a pretty easy divide there. The instant messaging was for stuff where it's like we're talking back and forth.

This is not social networking. This isn't the way Glassboard is sort of a private social network like Facebook or Twitter. This is conversation back and forth and then a Glassboard thing so Brent could be filled in on it, but all instant messaging and Glassboard.

Dave: I always knew if I didn't hear from you guys for hours that you were probably in some pretty intense IM discussions.

John: Intense is a funny word. Intense is funny, because we never really argued about anything.

Dave: Well, no, but intense as in intensely productive, like getting a lot done.

Guy: What do you mean you didn't argue about anything? You must have disagreed.

John: Sure. We disagreed.

Guy: You didn't want to strangle each other.

John: I think it depends on what you mean by argue. In the classical Greek sense we argued constantly.

Guy: Right.

John: I think in the terms of anger or a biter disagreement or unsettled, it really never happened. I really don't think that we have a single thing that we had to do a two out of three vote and the guy was...

Guy: Feeling sour.

John: Right.

Guy: That's good.

John: It's kind of amazing really. Dave is the one who pointed it out. The three of us are really almost famously opinionated and stubborn.

[laughter]

Dave: I would have put money on there being at least like one explosive fight at some point, but it never happened. I think the worst it ever got is there was one thing we were trying to decide if the thing should be at the top of the view or the bottom. Like we did anything, we tried it both ways.

We wound up all agreeing that it worked better one way than the other. It's really kind of anti-climactic in that way.

Rene: Because you're on Glassboard you got an incredible amount of feedback from some very opinionated people as well. You always seem to handle it very classily, but also you stuck to your guns where you had to and you made concessions where you had to.

John: I learned a ton from when I worked at Bare Bones Software which was a long time ago seemingly, 2000 to 2002. The way that Rich Siegel and everybody at Bare Bones handled Beta testing, to me, is the model. I couldn't imagine how it would be worse.

Now I'm on the outside, but 10 years later I'm still a Beta tester at BBS and it's still the same way which is a careful balance between being open with your testing team and being private and still keeping your plans to yourself. There's a balance there.

One thing you can never, ever underestimate is the power of just silence and taking, let's say, a really contentious critique from somebody on the testing team. Somebody really hates a change. Don't underestimate saying nothing, waiting a day and thinking, cooling off, letting your emotions cool if they hurt your feelings or whatever and then respond later.

Or the power of not responding in the forum, for Bare Bones when I was there it was email. It's an email list for the Beta testers. For us it's Glassboard, same thing. Don't respond but then privately internally take that criticism or advice or suggestion or whatever and think, "What's the actual problem that this complaint is about?"

The actual problem is this. Ignore his suggestion of how to do it. Let's think about the problem which is actually real, and we can do that.

Then you ship a build the next day that addresses it. I think it's super satisfying for everybody involved, including the tester who thinks, "Hey, they listened to me. Maybe I shouldn't have been so emotional when I made the request."

Brent: John is really good at sitting back and listening long enough to think of something smart to say. I think that influenced how we approached people's criticism or even positive comments. Taking the time, sitting back and thinking about it before saying anything at all.

I'm from the school of arguing on the Internet, so that was a departure in mental process for me, but a very healthy one.

Guy: That was such a good forum with so many smart things said, that you could actually just sell that as a like a little e-Book or something.

[laughter]

Brent: It was almost like a master class in how to run a Beta because you took all this feedback and made people feel validated. You were always very polite about how you handled it. I don't think anyone got into an argument with any feedback no matter how brisk it might have been.

Guy: Speaking of, do you want to explain the icon?

[laughter]

John: Dave?

Dave: You threw me under the bus.

Guy: I'm on the record as liking it.

Brent: I like it as well.

Guy: You're in a safe place.

Dave: I'm also on the record as liking it. To me we had a couple of options. We could either do something which would have been expected. It could have been the letter V on a plain or gradient background. I think the app store is full of those icons.

Or we could do something that was a complete departure and super 3D and suggested and looked pretty on it's on. Or we could do something that was just an abstraction of what we thought the UI was.

It really is just one half of a tag bubble against the near white background that we use in the app. That means Vesper to us. It focuses on the part of the UI that we think is most important, and it looked cool to us.

Rene: See, I completely missed that. I thought it was Bond walking out at the beginning of every movie in that little round bullet thing and then turning towards you. I thought you managed to capture that in mid turn.

John: Well, if we did that it would be some kind of trademark violation.

[laughter]

Rene: So you obviously didn't do that, but it does kind of bring me to the question about Vesper and branding and the feel of the app. I'm curious how far along in the process did you put it with that name and with that sort of feeling.

John: The name was Dave's idea.

Dave: The name was my idea, but it was, again, when Justin and I started this we had done it with the idea that here was something we could make and it would be really easy to get John to link to it. A lot of the decisions early on were made in the spirit of "What would John like?"

It was John's idea, and we figured we should be true to that anyway. I think before we had written any design notes or I had started in Photoshop, one of the first things I thought of is, "We should call it Vesper." It just seemed like a good idea for an app name.

John: I had a name for my concept back in 2009, to call it "What." It was all because I wanted to run a deck ad for the app that would say "You use What for notes?" "Yes."

[laughter]

Brent: What's on your iPhone?

Guy: Killed by cleverness is what that will do.

John: I thought that was such a clever slogan, "You use What for notes and tasks?" "Yes." Then I realized, "My God, can you imagine a more un-Google-able term?"

[laughter]

John: Like "what app," there would be 10 gazillion missed hits. Of course now it's a completely unusable name because there's "What's App" the instant messaging or whatever you want to call it which is like the number one downloaded app on the store.

They got around it cleverly by adding the S which I know is like a pun on "What's up," "What's App?" It gives them a way to make it Google-able, because "what's" up means nothing than their app.

That was my idea, which was a terrible idea. I even knew it at the time. I knew you can't pick an app like that just run the clever ad, but as soon as Dave told me Vesper...

[crosstalk]

Guy: You just wanted to make it funny.

John: As soon as Dave told me Vesper, I was like, "That's it." I knew it. I don't think there was ever any debate on it. That was one of those few things where it was like, "Yeah, we're done with that. Great, move on." We could have wasted a month on picking the app name.

Guy: It seems to me that the design almost falls out of that, too. You're clearing going after the James Bond vibe, and that leads you down the path of being sort of this refined -- well, I was going to say refined -- minimalistic kind of thing.

John: Almost timeless.

Guy: Yeah, but you could have gone with sultry women in the borders and stuff.

[laughter]

John: That would have gone over.

Guy: Yeah, but the whole thing does hang together from the icon to the credit screen to the interaction model.

John: I think it's the name. I think it's the company name, Q Branch, I think is where a lot of that comes from. Yeah, it's still the Bond thing, but we made a conscious decision with the name of the company that we weren't trying to be James Bond. There are no arguments over which one of us is James Bond. There is no personality thing.

Dave: It's clearly Brent. Brent is the guy doing the hard work.

[laughter]

Rene: One of you could be the Connery Bond, one could be...

[crosstalk]

Dave: ...I wanted to be M.

[laughter]

John: But we got to skip all that, and instead our focus is on, "We're the guys who make the cool things that James Bond uses."

Guy: Right, the user gets to be Bond.

John: Exactly.

Guy: You're sucking up to the people that are buying your app already, man.

Dave: It's a little touch, a little thing to center yourself if you ever feel like you're lost in a design debate. Just think, "What did the Q Branch guys do? They were scientists. They were making serious tools for serious purposes."

There's a line that the guy in the movie says I think at least once but maybe several times. Most famously is when he's showing the Aston Martin DB5 to Connery in, I think, "Goldfinger." He tells him about one of the gadgets, that it has an ejector seat.

Connery says, "You're joking." He just says, "I never joke about my work." That's an interesting way to approach. Clearly we're having some fun with some aspects of this stuff.

It's not like we're taking it like we've made an app that runs a nuclear power plant or something like that. Thinking about it as a serious tool that people are going to depend upon, centers you on making it a tool, not a gimmick.

Rene: Before we leave the icon debate entirely, you had a good comment on the Glassboard when you were discussing the icon. You said you found the divisiveness of it interesting. What was the interesting aspect of that to you?

John: If we had put out an icon and everybody said, "Yeah, that's OK" and left it at that, then I would be really concerned. Getting a strong reaction right down the middle...and I think more of the comments were about disliking the icon publicly.

A lot of people told us privately how much they liked the icon. It really came out to be kind of a 50/50 split. To me the icon's job is to be visually memorable. It has to represent the app. It has to mean the app. Love it or hate it, if you're remembering it, it's done its job.

Rene: It is an app icon that I can find instantly no matter what page it is on my iPhone. A lot of the other ones are beautifully designed, but I have to spend a lot of time visually parsing that information on the screen. Vesper is different enough that it almost always stands out no matter where it is.

John: It is literally...

[crosstalk]

[laughter]

John: Ideally you come up with an icon that everybody would hail as, "Wow, that's genius." If you can do that, that's great. I think a perfect, maybe the canonical example of that in the iOS era is Twitterific.

Back in 2008, I guess, that was the first app store year. That was when they won the first ADAs for the first iPhone version of Twitterific. It had whatever his name is, Ollie I think, the bird.

People have mentioned this before with regard to Twitter and their support for third clients, but Twitterific did that when Twitter didn't have any bird iconography at all. Their logo was a T. There were no birds on their website. They had no bird imagery at all.

Twitterific took that name Twitter, it could be an allusion to the noise that birds make, and they did that all on their own. You see that. It's memorable. It's attractive. It's a brand. It's a logo. It looks great on your dock. It makes you want to tap it. That's great.

How many icons are there like that? There's not that many. If we could have thought of something like that we would have done it. Better, like Dave said, to have something that evokes strong opinions than to have something that nobody complains about because nobody cares about.

Dave: If this thing launches and the entire world is talking about how much they hate that icon, I'm happy.

Brent: I guarantee you that by the time this podcast airs that our app store page...I'll make a bet with any of you guys for any amount of money that there is at least, I don't know what the number is, three complaints about the app icon in the comments on the app store page. Guaranteed.

John: It's like the app itself. It's not designed to be for everyone. It's very opinionated. It's very bold in how it approaches things. I think in that sense the icon does a pretty good job of representing the app.

Dave: From my point of view the icon also wears very well. It's actually grown on me over time. Now, of course, I'm close to it. I look at it every day. I think I like it a little bit more every single day too. I like design that takes that aspect into account. There are plenty of things that look gorgeous on day one and on day two look tired. Our icon is the opposite.

John: There was a version of the icon that had that effect. We tried the letter V for a day. It was very late in the process. It was kind of a "what about this?" We looked at it. We were intensely in love with this thing. We slept on it. We woke up in the morning and we kind of looked at the icon and said, "No, that was a mistake."

Guy: What were we thinking?

John: It was really bad. It didn't keep.

Dave: But it didn't create a bad first impression. It just really wore poorly.

Guy: I like it because it invokes the interface and it sticks out like a sore thumb, and that's not a bad thing. It's easily spotted and tapped.

John: I hope that people will at least assume, or we might even show this at some point, but I have a whole sheet of different icon ideas. It's not like this was our first idea and we just ran with it.

We went through a very, very large number of different shapes and different ideas. One of them was even like a 3D manila folder with like a piece of paper hanging out of it. It got super literal.

Guy: It was the wrong thing to do.

John: Of course, but we had to try it. There were a lot of things we did in this process throughout the entire design and development process that were, in retrospect, obviously wrong. At the time we wanted to make sure that we at least thought it through.

Dave: Or to prove they were wrong.

John: Right. The icon, we went through so many iterations of that. This is what we felt best captured the app.

Rene: You mentioned 3D in the icon. This is a decidedly not 3D app. How soon in the design process was that decision made? Was it sort of an absolute, or did that grow over iterations?

John: It's funny you say that. I think it's more of a 3D app than most apps.

Rene: It's 3D in the way that LetterPress is because it's not richly textured but there's a level of play in the way the words bounce or move around or are layered.

Dave: And our navigation is all Z-Access. Well, not all, but very little moves from side to side.

Brent: There's no faux 3D. It's a real 3D app.

Dave: In a way, yeah.

John: Let's use the F word, flat. We didn't go flat immediately. We didn't say, "Let's make a flat app." We thought, "Let's Blue Sky. Let's do three or four different, wildly different, initial, this is the rough sketch look and feel of what it would be."

The first one, I think, was more or less like what Dave had talked about that he had based on work he had done with Justin Williams. It looked really good, but it looked a lot more like what you would think an iPhone notes app would look like in terms of shadows and textures and stuff like that.

The second one was in terms of this loose idea that we'd do three or four that are just wildly different, make three or four completely different apps. The second one was this one, and we just never made three or four because we thought, "Clearly this is the way we should go. This is something."

Dave: I think we did three or four versions of this. I've got old comps where there were different color schemes and different arrangements. I had just shown you guys a couple days ago, I went back and found the very first, again, the F word, flat version of Vesper.

We looked at it. I think your comment was it's amazing how close to the final product that looked.

John: Yeah.

Dave: And I think we found something that rang true for us then, and we just iterated on that.

John: Right. So you come down through...it's almost like a logarithmic scale, where you're going at an order of magnitude. But you start with the rough picture, and you say OK, this one, but now you do 10 more like that and come up with another level of refinement and another...

And each of these levels of refinement are finer and finer and finer, and you're starting to talk about things like should this, if we draw a line here, should it two pixels or one pixel?

Well, what if we did two pixels but we lighten the color to make a look a little thinner? Literally sweating the pixels on the retinal display. A couple of iterations earlier, you were talking big picture. Should there even be a line here?

I just remember this talk at South by Southwest that Michael Lopp gave years ago, where he talked about working at Apple. He just talked about the process where that it would be 10 designers would have to do 10 comps.

It would have to be pixel perfect. Each one had to be a genuine proposal of this is exactly what the app should look like. Then, you would have to be ready to defend all 10 of them.

You couldn't just do the thing, well, here's the real one and I'll do nine that are crap. Come on, you know which one you're supposed to pick. You had to do 10 that were all legit. Then one would get picked.

Then, you would have to do 10 more based on that one, based on the notes from the meeting. Then you would have another meeting, then you'd take more notes, one would be picked as the direction to go, but then you'd do 10 more. Add a level of refinement.

I remember he's giving this and he was talking about how hard work it is and what a great hard process she is. I remember thinking, "Wouldn't that be great though, to be the guy who gets to say, 'Now give me some more,'" which is what I got to do here.

[laughter]

John: That was years ago. That's why I've enjoyed working on this so much. That Dave and Brent never felt, or at least never told me they felt that I was putting them out but that I could just keep asking, "All right, that's the way, but now give me three options that are based on that."

Brent: I've got this painting...

Guy: How much of a pain in the ass was it working with John?

John: [laughs]

Guy: I cut you off at [inaudible 54:08] . Go ahead.

Brent: I'll go back to that real quick. I've got this painting in my bedroom. A friend of mine is a painter, and she paints cityscapes. It's a gorgeous painting. It's this almost super high-color pop arts meet art deco sort of a thing. I love the painting.

She also gave me the pencil sketch that she did before the painting. I've got that hanging up on my fridge. To compare the two, they're obviously very different, but you can see how one is a direct descendant of the other. I think it's interesting to look back at our earliest stuff and see Vesper in that same light.

Guy: That's interesting. One thing I wanted to talk to you guys about was, I'll call it the kinetics of the app. You earlier described it as z-axis oriented, but it's more than that. And the other thing that I wanted to ask about was the gesture-based navigation, which changed a lot during the beta process.

Going in, did you have strong opinions on the gesture-based stuff, and how did that evolve during the process?

Dave: It's not gesture-based, so much as direct manipulation.

Guy: That's a better way of putting it.

John: That's a really good point, and that's important. Can I take that from there just for a second?

For example, if you want to archive a note, you swipe on it from right to left. But it's not like you do a swipe and then the archive happens. As you move your finger, the note tracks your finger on the screen exactly as you move.

The idea in your head, and I think in terms of feel, it's a huge difference. Now compare and contrast that with the standard UI table view in iOS, where you can swipe on it and it makes a Delete button appear. That's a gesture. You're not moving anything. You just do a swipe on the row and a Delete button appears.

Whereas in Vesper, I don't think we have a single gesture that works like that. Everything where you do a swipe, you're moving the actual thing, which I think is a huge plus in terms of making it feel nice.

Guy: Yeah, and that's a great distinction.

Dave: It's not an abstract command.

Guy: Right. I think that's why I picked "kinetic" to describe it at first, and then stumbled by saying "gesture." But you're right, it feels very direct. When you grab the list view and you slide it aside, it just feels like you're dragging the entire panel to the side.

Dave: That's how scroll views work. It feels so much better to be consistent in that way. If you tap something and move it, it should move.

Guy: Yes.

John: I'll tell you for an example. I've played with a Microsoft Surface which is that big table thing. It predates the iPhones by years. It was laggy, and I think because it was laggy, it had a lot of things where to scroll you would swipe gestures.

You would do it in the same way, but because it wasn't tracking it just didn't feel fun. There are a lot of reasons Microsoft Surface didn't catch on. I think there's a reason a lot of touch screens before the iPhone didn't catch on.

Swipe gestures that aren't really tracking the thing are like shortcuts. They're like keyboard short cuts. You just have to know to do it and then something happens as opposed to feeling like you're directly manipulating the objects that you see.

Dave: I had never in my life actually written code that used the pan gesture recognizer before. That was eye opening to me. I had always done swipes and taps and stuff. I love the pan gesture recognizer. I want to make everything panable. That's the key to making it feel alive. That's the direct manipulation right there, the technical side of it.

Guy: At one point pretty late in the process you inverted the swiped archive. I don't want to call it a gesture, a movement, action. You used to swipe it off to the right.

John: I can take this. Our initial builds and the ones we used internally before we went outside the three of us, to archive an item you would swipe from the left to the right. We didn't have anything happen on a swipe from right to left.

Our thinking was we weren't sure what we wanted to do. Our ideas were maybe swiping the other way would do the exact same thing, so you could archive an item by swiping either way.

There is some precedence in that with the UI table view where you can get that delete thing to show up by swiping and putting a swipe short cut on it either way even though the delete button always shows up on the same side.

That seemed a little weird. It seemed like if you're going to go with the kinetic model and that there's a little hidden archive label and an arrow that shoots it over on the side it seems weird that it would be on both sides. We also thought maybe that would be a shortcut for delete to swipe the other way.

Then that seemed dangerous because in a standard UI table view you can swipe either way to make the same thing happen, you get a little delete button whereas we were going to think about maybe having one way be an archive which is safe because it's sending your item to a nice safe place and the other way be a delete.

It wouldn't be like an instant delete. There would be some kind of confirmation dialog or something like that, but it just seemed like it would maybe be an unpleasant surprise.

What wound up happening, and this is the reason it's great to have a great beta testing crew, is that testers really seemed adamant that they wanted a swipe from left to right to open the side bar.

They didn't want to have to hit the hamburger button. Kinetics, I haven't used that word, but that is a good word, though. There's like a solidness to it. I would often talk in these broad terms to Dave about, "Make it feel like a thing, like an actual thing that you're dealing with."

With all the other ways that the app felt like a thing, it just made sense for, as we call it, the timeline of notes to feel like a thing. That was one thing where a lot of testers felt strongly about it. There were none who argued the other way.

When we implemented it, it made them happy. That meant that our only two options, if we were going to let you swipe the timeline to open that sidebar left to right, we could either not having swiping left to right on notes to do something.

Or we could have it like you would have to sort of do it from the edge only to move the whole timeline and do a thing in the middle. That seemed a little fiddly I would say.

Guy: I think I suggested that one, and it was wrong. I think our build got out like that, and it was just kind of wacky.

John: We could have done what you suggested, though, and played more with the regions of the tap.

Guy: I feel like you could have done it, but it was weird. That [inaudible 01:01:30] was weird, and I think this...

Go ahead.

John: I can't even count how many hamburger apps, you know, hamburger design pattern apps I've downloaded over the past two months to see how they do it. I mean everyone I could find I downloaded, and some have that, and there's some that have a pretty good touch on that.

But I just think in broad terms, though, it makes it seem a little too fiddly.

Brent: And you don't have to think about this one. You can just swipe from anywhere and it happens. It removes another point of memory for you.

Dave: Well, it's also that direct manipulation kinetic thing of if you want this thing to...if there's a button that moves this thing out of the way, you should also just be able to move it out of the way.

John: Right.

Rene: Was the hamburger basement metaphor something that you had to discuss, or was it always involved in the app?

John: I think it was there from my original designs, and it wasn't because I was super excited about hamburgers and basements, in fact very much the opposite. I really tried to come up with a way to do this that didn't have that feel.

The truth is it just kept coming back to at the time I didn't want tabs at the bottom. Because that got in the way of other things, and it seemed like a weird restriction to place and a weird visual restriction to place on the app, and it eventually wound up being the right thing to do.

Rene: You do it really nicely, like you pull sideways, the other one pulls slightly behind it. There's a lot of little visual touches that makes it feel more alive.

Brent: Did you notice how the nav bar changes as you're pulling in the timeline? I think that's my favorite little touch right there.

Guy: My favorite is that the basement -- I guess that's the term -- is slightly shorter in terms of height. Like it's clearly behind it. There's a visual stacking going on.

Rene: I quite love that when you try to archive something and you decide...you change your mind and you go back, the text kind of bounces to get you there. It doesn't just smoothly go back.

John: It bounces more depending how far you have pulled it.

Rene: Yes, it's a really nice kinetics, not just kinetics.

Guy: [laughs] Yes.

Dave: This could be the time when I answer the question about working with John.

Brent: I have an answer for that, too.

Dave: Oh, you should go first.

Guy: Yes, I said that just to be snotty, but...

Brent: But it is a serious question. Was it a pain in the ass working with John or with Dave? The answer is, "No," and the reason for that is really important.

It's a pain in the ass to work with people who don't share your love of quality, or people who don't communicate very well, or people who aren't good at what they do. All those things can make work a real pain in the ass.

But if people are on the same level as you and have the same goal and bring to the table what's needed, then it's great. Then no amount of work or iteration, or whatever, could possibly be a bother, because you all have the goal, and you all know what it takes to make really great software. So it wasn't a pain in the ass at all. Dave?

Dave: For me, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, at least, it would be disingenuous to not call out the fact that of the three of us I'm the kid in a lot of ways. I'm the youngest and I'm the least experienced, and, of course, to work with John and Brent there's a certain amount of I feel like I need to keep up.

It's cool for me because it means that there's no opportunity, there's no room for me to have ego about anything that I do so it's a very healthy process in that way.

But more directly, being able to take this attitude of I'm here to learn and to do my best work possible. To work with guys who they also don't approach anything with ego. The objective in every case and every conversation is, "How do we make this thing the best thing we can make it?" It makes all the difference in the world.

Day-to-day working process, especially with John, I think that the perception of John's involvement, at least I think for me even up front, the guess was it would be Brent and I doing the work, and John would be sort of directing things in the way that like you think of traffic being directed.

What ends up happening, though, in reality was a really close working relationship with both John and Brent, but especially John on the design side where we would have conversations, IM conversations, iMessage conversations that would stretch out over the course of 12 hours on a given day.

These would happen many, many days in a row -- still do -- where we're talking about the smallest of details and zooming back out to the largest of details. When I said earlier that the gross oversimplification is that John talks, I draw pictures, it's not too far from the truth, where there's a lot of discussion amongst the three of us, even, that goes into something before Photoshop work even happens.

So there's a real sense of workflow, and a real sense of everybody's got their place, and there are things that we all do that we can sit down and talk of. Nothing is off limits to talk about.

Brent: It's kind of interesting that it isn't like we had to feel our way to this workflow. We were pretty close, at least from my point of view, from the beginning.

John: Yes, it fell into place.

Dave: Well, we all work from home by ourselves, anyway, so this wasn't a weird change in that way.

Guy: Well, John, I wanted to ask you, was getting back sort of back into active development or product development, was that a stress for you? Was it like a leap? Did it change things up a bit?

John: Yes, I've enjoyed it, and all of my product design work predates the iPhone. I mean that's just sort of a funny coincidence, but it was 2006 when I went full-time at Daring Fireball and the iPhone came out in 2007, and I haven't done any freelance work or other design work since then. So that's new.

Guy: The last design work was joint, right?

John: Right, which was a web apps, right, although some similar notions in here, like tag orient, tags for organization and stuff like that. So there's a little pressure there because if you haven't designed something for a while, 2013 is a little late to the game [laughs] to be working on your first iPhone app, but I felt like I jumped right in.

The other thing, too, was the way that our team works, is that I really got to do only what I'm good at, which is thinking about how things should look as opposed to actually doing it, writing the code. I'm not terrible at writing code, but I'm so painfully slow, and I couldn't do any...I mean just way, way, way, way terrible.

Dave: He's like the MN.

John: I'm no good at Photoshop, either, other than setting type and writing regular expressions, I'm not really good at that.

Brent: We should talk about that, your typography, your -- I don't even know what the word is. I want to say love for it, but I don't think that's a strong enough word.

Rene: Passion?

Brent: Let's go with passion. That was a huge influence on everything we did.

John: Right. That was one of the first things we kind of hit upon, although I think I came upon that after you first did the flattish design.

Then I thought, "Well, what if we made it a typographic-centered app, more like, or at least lessons we could draw inspiration from designing a book than a designing software, and let the type speak for itself in as many places as possible?"

Guy: So you are very influenced by Windows phone.

[laughter]

Brent: The thing for me about the app is that it is type-centric because of the retina display and because of the flatness of the app, but you still have information density, which I don't feel like Metro has. There's still a lot of information that you manage them on the page. So that almost becomes a star along with the typography.

John: There's actually a difference there, specific to Windows phone. One of my basic rules of thumb when I'm designing anything and it's going to have text, is you start thinking in terms of boxes. Almost everybody does unless you're designing "Ray Gun Magazine." I don't know if you guys have heard about "Ray Gun?"

Guy: Yes. Very well.

John: It always blew me away because my design always is in boxes. So "Ray Gun" I love. Never read a word of it because I couldn't, but I always wanted.

[laughter]

John: It blew me away because it was the type of typography that I could never do. I always think in terms of boxes, a column here and rectangles. You have a column here, you have a column here, and you have a thing at the top, a horizontal bar.

When you start thinking about that as a designer, you naturally want to draw the boxes and then put the type in the boxes. You don't have to do that. The text naturally forms boxes by itself, it forms gutters by itself so you don't have to draw rules between the elements.

A lot of the times, for a lot of different design products, you don't need to draw the boxes. The text itself naturally forms them.

So we really tried to take that as far as we could, including, for example, pretty notably a fact that what we call the timeline in the list of notes, there's no visual rule between them. It's just the text itself that forms the blocks so that you could see that there are discreet items in the list.

Guy: You did tweak the inter-item spacing though to try to play with that boxing feel.

[crosstalk]

Dave: We wanted the fields to feel separate. That's one of the things we went through, dozens and dozens of iterations in terms of how best to let the text form boxes by itself.

John: And text with image thumbnails forming boxes, I think that was the biggest challenge that we faced.

Guy: That's another thing I wanted to ask because I was advocating just ditching images further than 1.0. But you managed to do a really good job with them. Because there's weird stuff. The entire UI is built around text-notes.

Dave: You might have been the thing that pushed us over the edge on that because you said we should ditch, like screw him, we're going to get this right.

[laughter]

Guy: Good, because you did get it right, because it's weird stuff. What if you have just an image in your note, no words? There's any number of weird things to do with images that aren't necessarily easy to fit into the UI you've got.

Can you talk a little bit about what the thinking was behind that, besides just screw the I, which is fine? That's a good enough motivation for me. But what was the thought process?

John: Well, at the highest level it's not about what it looks like. It's what's the point? What's the problem that's being solved? And the problem that's being sold with the app is you have something in your head that you want to remember.

To me maybe the main point of the app is that the app works the way I've always felt my brain should work. I forget things all the time. I'll leave the house with the idea that I have to drop off the rent check, I have to pick up the dry cleaning and then go to the grocery store. Those are only the three reasons I've left the house.

I'll go pick up the dry cleaning and then come home. Then, I'll still have the rent check in my pocket and didn't go to the grocery store. I'll think, "Oh." Because if I don't have it written down and I can't see it, then...That's almost an absurd example but take that to everything that's supposed to be on my head.

Some of the things that I want to remember are a picture. It's like somebody says, "Hey, buy this beer, this beer is great." I'll take a picture of it and then write it down and then I can remember it for the next time I am at the beer store.

Dave: Or taking the photo of a whiteboard, which I do all the time.

John: Right.

Guy: Yeah. I take a photo of my fridge when it...

[crosstalk]

John: So I take pictures of things, ever since I've had the iPhone back in 2007, things I want to remember later. The problem is with the way of doing it where you're using the camera app, not just to say, "Hey, here's a picture to add to iPhoto, here's a picture of this thing I want to remember later," like a remember to-do or remember to buy.

If you do it, and if it's not something you deal with in the next day or two, all of a sudden three-four months go by and it's the time you want to remember it, well now it's hundreds of pictures away in your camera roll and there's no way to search.

Whereas in Vesper you can take that picture, add a couple of words, just a couple of words just to say what it is so that you'll know you'll be able to search for it and then four, five, six months later you'll be able to find it.

Rene: Which is really smart because you described the app during this conversation as both notes and to-dos, and it really is a hybrid, as it lets you collect your thoughts, even if they don't fit in that precise category either.

Dave: That was the idea. I think when we sat down in Montreal and talked what we should work on, we talked about what was then the proto stage of Vesper. I think Brent was resistant to working on a to-do app. It evolved from there.

What if it wasn't about what you're doing so much as just things that you have in your head that you want to capture?

There were three obvious use cases for us. John with writing and collecting ideas as he moves through the world and picks up pieces of information that he's going to write about later on during Fireball.

Brent with having ideas, things that he wants to capture and code, or how he wants to do things, and specifically for me with music, being able to want to write down things like lyric ideas, things like that.

We very quickly came up with an idea which turned into Vesper but applied to all three of those things, like what can we do to just build a system where all of those things could be quickly captured for later use.

Rene: What I love also is that it fits different use models. I discussed on the Glassboard that I don't use tags, or I stopped using tags shortly because for me the most important stuff is the short term memory or the cash, not writing it to disk.

So I just put a couple of things down quickly and then I archive them when I'm done. I haven't found a need for long-term storage yet but this has nailed the short-term storage for me.

Guy: Yeah, and I am also not a huge user of tags, although I do have one for a couple of things, like Çingleton gets a tag. But I don't have a huge list of tags. Are you guys very heavy on the tags or do you just have a handful, three or four kind of thing?

John: I've nine.

Guy: You have nine.

Brent: I got 10 or so to look here.

Guy: Yeah, like do you have...?

[crosstalk]

John: It was designed though.

Guy: ...something the design that you thought how many tags are people going to have.

Dave: I have 17.

Guy: Wow.

John: I have 12.

No, it was definitely something that we brought up. Part of it is in form by my usage of other previous apps that use tagging, apps like Yojimbo, Delicious and now Pinboard for bookmarks where I have lots and lots of tags.

Pinboard and Delicious are a perfect example where they show the tagging interface is this tag cloud. You guys have all seen this. It's like a rectangular block of tags and they use a bigger font for the ones you use more frequently.

Guy: I really hate word clouds.

John: I don't like them at all. It looks so gross. But it's a way to deal with lots and lots of tags. It makes it look though, having that, is a cue to the user.

I think that you're supposed to use lots of tags, so that you're going along and you're acting like a librarian and making this card catalog system of everything you've put into the system and cataloging it in every way you want.

When you're in the library you do want -- I'm sure that real libraries don't have actual card catalogs -- but want a database where everything is indexed anyway you would want it.

Here's a better metaphor. The difference between the index of a book which is how I think a lot tagging systems encourage you to go, where you have hundreds of entries by the time you've used the app for a couple of months, or the chapter, the table of contents, which is really just chapter headings where maybe you've got a dozen of them because that's the book.

We definitely set out to design a thing where we don't enforce it if you want to have a hundred tags. Brent, you can talk about this with the sample data we tested the app with upfront, but it will work.

We definitely stress test it with a lot of tags. But we designed it in a way that discourages it maybe, or at least gives you a cue that you're doing it wrong if you do it that way. Because when you're in an item, if you add two tags, they sit there right next to each other. It looks great.

If you add a third tag, it doesn't wrap around. It scrolls off to the right. The overflow scrolls off and you can pan it with your finger and see them all. But if you have five or six tags on an item, you can't see them all at once.

That's purposeful. We didn't get that for free. We designed it that way though to suddenly discourage you and suggest that maybe adding five or six tags on an item is the wrong way to go.

Guy: Yeah, I don't think he's in tags the right way, if you've got five, eight planes of why it's important, why this note is important. Or you've got is a note that's basically like a 12-page essay, which is also not the right thing to do.

John: The idea of tags for us was more about not dumping a bunch of metadata on notes, so much as of us connecting one thing to another.

Guy: Right. Yeah.

John: Again, I like this metaphor of chapter headings. It should also be naturally useful and we had this in mind from the outset, to use the app without any tags at all, or literally just one or two and maybe instead of writing a multi-chapter book, your Vesper library is just a booklet and doesn't need chapter divisions, which should definitely work fine like that, and not make you feel like you are underutilizing the app.

I think is one of those things that nobody really talks about. But I always find it unsettling when I'm using an app and I feel I'm vastly under-utilizing it. I'm using two features in this app with a hundred features and it always makes me feel. I don't know what the word, maybe a little guilty, like I'm doing it wrong.

Guy: Yeah, it makes me feeling inept. You know what, I think a lot of to-do apps, not necessarily Vesper, but stuff like Omnifocus, or what's the word...?

John: The GTD apps.

Guy: Exactly the GTD apps, I think there's a big market for those because the same people end up buying each one.

Brent: You need to buy into a philosophy to make that work.

Guy: Yeah, exactly. So this is what I think. People buy those apps, feel guilty, like John is saying, that they don't end up using them after the first few days, because there's so many planes of importance.

Rene: Right, like gym memberships.

[laughter]

Guy: Exactly. That's exactly what I think I've spoken. Yeah. And they blame themselves for not using the app and then try a different one.

John: Yeah, why don't I understand this? Why is this so hard for me to use?

Guy: What's wrong with me?

John: What's wrong with me? Yeah.

Guy: So nobody blames the app.

Dave: I made the joke earlier. That's actually completely true, but I have a copy of OmniFocus and there's one item in OmniFocus and that is re-getting things done. I think I've never done it and it's just sitting there.

John: But I will say this, I think OmniFocus is a great app. I think if you ever go to MacWorld or something, or they won't have MacWorld this year, but I've been there at their booth and you see it. Their users are fanatics. But you have to buy into the system.

And we have, you know, we have a bug tracker. We use Lighthouse for Vesper, and what's a bug tracker? What's an issue tracker? It's a to-do system, really, and it's way more complicated than Vesper. I mean, I'm pretty happy with Lighthouse. I think it's worked out well. I hadn't used it before this.

For certain projects of a level of complexity, you need a complex app with a system. And OmniFocus is a good example of that for people who want to use that to manage their stuff. But that's not the problem that Vesper's solving.

Vesper is not a competitor to OmniFocus. I think it's something that OmniFocus users might use for other things, things that don't fit within the system of OmniFocus.

Guy: Yes. I definitely agree. Yeah, like I wasn't saying that to disparage the GTD apps. It's just more that I think that a lot of those...I think it's the same thing with Delicious library. I think people buy Delicious library, don't end up using it to catalog all their books, and blame themselves.

Rene: Well, doesn't that depend how much overhead the app has? Like, one of the things I like about Vesper is it feels like it has no overhead. I can tag or not tag or Malik could write his entire Moto-X review if he wants to in this.

But I could just put two lines to remember. I like the fact that there's no exceptional debt put on me just by opening the app.

John: That was another thing we discussed early on, was whether or not we should have a character limit.

Dave: Yeah.

Guy: Boy, that would be an interesting choice.

John: Well, it was the...

Guy: So is there one? There's not one that I've hit.

Rene: Me either.

John: Is there a...there might be a database limit, like how many billions of characters you can put in there. Is there, Brent?

Brent: Not that I know of. I mean, eventually, there must be a limit, right? Where it's a 64 bit machine, so...

[laughter]

John: Before it cries?

Brent: Yeah, I mean, you know, you could take all the words in all the galaxies in all the universe and maybe...I have no idea.

Rene: How much data testing did you do and how did you do it?

Brent: So this is where I got to torture everybody in advance. So I had the bare bones of the timeline and the sidebar. I call it sidebar instead of basement, but whatever. I had the bare bones of those two things working, but no way to enter a note yet. So I wanted to make sure that the database would be fast and would scale really well.

So we imported all of Dave's tweets from the beginning of time to whatever, end of January this year and Daring Fireball linked list. So we had something like 30,000-ish items, 2,000 or so tags. I just kept going over that performance stuff until I made it so it could handle that.

Because one thing I learned from years of doing NetNewsWire testing is that there are people who will do things that you just think are really out of control and crazy. I would have people, beta testers for NetNewsWire, who would have over 2,000 subscriptions, or one guy who had that many browser tabs open.

John: [laughs] John Siracusa ...

[crosstalk]

Brent: ...Yes, of course. And so I learned, like, John Siracusa's going to walk right in and do something nuts, or if it's not Siracusa, it's somebody like him. Not that he's nuts, but he expects the app to be able to work the way he does. It may be really taxing unless you handle that stuff right up front.

So it was quite a while before John or Dave could actually make a note and see how that worked.

Dave: That was a glorious day.

John: It was pretty cool, though, that by the time we were able to make a note, we knew that we had an app that could handle 13 or 14,000 notes, and like Brent said, like 2,000 tags. That, actually, as a side note, made me feel like I hadn't wasted my time over all the years by tagging all of the entries on Daring Fireball, because the tags aren't actually exposed anywhere.

You can actually see them in the RSS feed in some, I don't know, obscure RSS metadata field on each entry. But on the actual website, I don't have the tags exposed anywhere. You can't browse by tag. But as I've gone, I've tagged everything, and I've tagged it stupidly.

Well, maybe it's not stupid. I don't know. But when I tag an article by somebody, I tag their name. There's people who only have one entry because it was some guy who wrote an article for computer world six years ago. But having a...

Brent: You know, it was actually...I'm sorry.

John: Having a database with 2,000 tags actually came in useful.

Guy: Yeah. That sounds good.

Brent: It was a fascinating app, actually, using the tagged version of Daring Fireball, I would just walk around in the app going like, "Oh, well, what's in this tag?"

John: Yeah, they were pretty cool.

Guy: John, sell that. What are talking...?

[laughter]

John: There were two, yeah, two apps before Vesper. One was my Twitter archive, and one was the Daring Fireball archive. Both were surprisingly remarkably interesting to tap around in.

Rene: Are all these in-app purchases?

[laughter]

John: Daring Fireball's archive did not prove a good stress test for included images.

[laughter]

Dave: That's right. It was a bunch of pictures of my dog, I think, is what we used for the testing.

Rene: Pixel's still in it in the final release, right?

John: Yeah.

[crosstalk]

Brent: That's one of the things I really like, too, is that you show people how to use the app by using the app. It's almost like the Super Mario Brothers version, rather than the instruction template version.

John: Yeah. I think of it very specifically along those lines of Super Mario Brothers versus Legend of Zelda, where we don't take you through a walk-through. It's just kind of a look, here's the world you're going to exist in.

Here's some examples of how you're going to do things, and now you're on your own because we trust that you're smart enough to work it out.

Brent: The app is...maybe intuitive is the wrong word, but logical and sensible enough that the things that you think you can do, you can do, and the examples give you just enough to kind of hint you on your way to get there.

John: Well, the thing that I hate, and you see this a lot. I'm not going to name any names, but there are very modern iOS apps that do this thing where they'll overlay. When you first launch the app, they'll provide an overlay with script text, almost unreadable script text.

Here's where this button is, and it draws an arrow and shows you how to do something.

It's almost entirely unusable. Nobody's going to read it. It's like they acknowledge that the thing was hard to use, and this is the best they could come up with.

Guy: You could name a name. You can say iPhoto, because then we're not hurting anybody's feelings, other than people at Apple. They don't have feelings.

[laughter]

John: Right, but iPhoto for iOS has that button you click that's like tell me what the fuck is going on.

Brent: Which is actually better than Adobe Photoshop or iOS, which needs that button and doesn't have it.

John: I was thinking. I'll name names. I think it was Netflix was the one that I was thinking of, where the first time you launch it...

[crosstalk]

Guy: Name names? Napkin does something similar. My app.

John: Yeah, those guys. What's their problem?

Guy: Well, I don't know. So...

[crosstalk]

John: ...Well, yeah, but yours is annotation app. It makes sense.

Brent: You're annotating your app?

Guy: Yeah, what we do is there's a mode where for the first little time when you're using it, we put a little purple question mark on the canvas items that explain how they work.

John: Yeah, that's not the same thing as blocking the UI with one screen you can't get back that has all the instructions on it.

Guy: That's true, because we considered that and then thought that sucked.

Rene: Can I use this as a way just to segue into accessibility? Because I was really happy when I saw the credits, and it said Doug Russell there, who Dave was kind of enough to bring on, iterate, to explain the importance of accessibility. You didn't only talk about it, Dave, you actually put it in the app.

Dave: Yeah, I figured if I was going to talk the talk, had to walk the walk. I'm not going to take credit as the guy who cares about accessibility. We all were interested in making that happen. With our timeline, and with only three of us, it was not realistic that we could have it 1.0.

So we called up Doug and asked if he would like to help out. He was kind of enough to lend us some of his time.

Rene: How did that work for Vesper, because it's not a traditional UI kit application? So what kind of work did you have to do to make it accessible?

John: We turned it over to Doug.

[laughter]

Rene: You outsourced?

Dave: Well, yeah, I mean, we gave him access to the repository, and he knew what needed to be done, and he went ahead and did it, and that was great. Frankly, we've been so busy getting 1.0 done, I haven't gone back to review what he's actually done. But I'm quite keen because I'd like to learn myself how this stuff works...

[crosstalk]

Guy: I don't know if you guys know, but that's exactly what happens inside Apple.

John: Does it just get kicked over to the accessibility guys?

Guy: The accessibility teams take care of it, yeah.

John: Yeah, Doug Russell is our accessibility team. He's freelance, so if you want accessibility work, don't go to him, because we want as much of his time as we can get, but maybe he can recommend somebody for you.

Guy: Yeah. You know what? Let's pitch that, because I'm a huge proponent of accessibility stuff.

John: Yeah, and I've worked with Doug in the past. The guy is just super, super whip smart, and having him on this was a real joy.

Rene: I see Doug regularly, too. He's here in Seattle, so...

[crosstalk]

Guy: So why was it such a no brainer for you to include accessibility stuff? And that was added pretty late in the game, I think, right?

Dave: Some of it was. It was a no brainer because we knew that Doug would be happy to do it. He had already said yes, and it wasn't going to block us in any way...

[crosstalk]

John: ...It also seems like an app that would be useful for anybody, whatever level of vision or whatever other accessibility problems they might have. It seems like an app that's potentially useful to anybody. Obviously, there's some kinds of apps that are purely visual and accessibility is less of a...you can't make it accessible.

Guy: Yeah, like I want to make Napkin accessible, and I don't know what the purpose is. The end output is images, right?

John: Right. Yeah, that's a perfect example, or I was thinking like paper, the sketching app.

Dave: Well, I don't know. They made the camera accessible.

Guy: Yeah. They're smarter than I am.

Dave: If blind people can take pictures, they should be able to annotate speed shots.

John: Well, there's a way. I don't mean to say you can't. But you know, and how can you make certain games accessible? But Vesper seems like a perfect candidate for an app that ought to be properly accessible.

Guy: I agree, and I'm really glad that you guys got into 1.0.

Brent: Yeah, us, too.

Rene: What about some of the things that didn't make it into 1.0, because everything is decision. Your time and resources are limited. I know people were asking about import, export, and you explained on the Glassboard why you hadn't done that or done that yet.

What was the process like for you to determine what you were going to do for 1.0?

John: Well, we really wanted it to be an email client and blog editor.

[laughter]

Guy: Letters dot app.

Dave: Under the hood, it's nearly an RSS reader. Just add RSS.

Brent: Given its lineage...

Guy: Is that true?

John: I think I made that joke, by the way. When we sat down and said what should we do, I think I made a letters joke, and I got a dirty look, so I never brought it up again.

[laughter]

John: It's funny because in the months that we've been working on Vesper, quite a few...I mean, the whole knock against email apps is that they're so hard to do, that you just...and that because every single operating system in the world has a good one built in.

Then there's companies like Google making high quality Gmail clients available everything, etc., etc., that it's just you can't. There's just no market for it.

But yet in the meantime, it is interesting to me that just in the time we've been working on Vesper, a couple of, I think, super high quality email apps have appeared for iOS, Mailbox and Triage.

Guy: Yeah, you know what, though? They did what you suggested we do, which was build a Gmail client.

John: Right. That's...

Guy: Good on you for making the right choice.

John: That is, you know what...?

Guy: Bad on us for not doing anything about it.

John: It's just another example of me being right, I guess.

[laughter]

John: Long story short, for people who don't know. Years ago, how many years ago was it?

Brent: Four?

John: Four years, I don't know.

Brent: Maybe.

Dave: It was probably around the time I came up with the idea for Vesper. It was probably around 2009 or so. But there was an idea that a bunch of us and I forget who. Brent, did you spearhead it?

Brent: Yeah.

John: It was Brent's idea that we should do...

Dave: Brent's idea. You started running it. Gus wrote most of the code. I spent time trying to understand how MIME encoding works. That gave me headache, and that's why I drink so heavily still.

John: And the whole thing that...and what was I, the president, I think my title was?

Dave: You were actually elected.

John: Yeah. I was. So I guess that's the last. That is the last. I shouldn't say that Vesper's the first time I've come out of my Daring Fireball cave in recent years. That was one, and it was obviously, you know, turned out like a wet firecracker, but...

Guy: Well, if you look at the GitHub repo, honestly, it says a suicide mission, but it can't hurt to try.

John: Right. Exactly. We did have that notion at the outset, that a very likely outcome was exactly the way it turned out. But the bottom line that I think, as I recall, the reason it failed was that there was no solid IMAP open source library that we could use to do IMAP satisfactorily. So we'd have to do our own IMAP.

Doing our own IMAP was just a Mount Everest of work to support.

Guy: Gus did start on it and got quite a ways, but with only one kind of server and things went south. And we were hearing from people on the Apple mail team that we were crazy [laughs] , so that didn't help.

John: Right. My proposed solution to the morass was well, let's cut off IMAP support in general and just do an app that only works with Gmail. Then we'll have one thing to target with a significant number of users.

It brought the project to a close because it was all a labor of love. It wasn't a thing. I don't think we had any aspirations of making any money on it. We just wanted a cool IMAP client for Mac. But almost everybody involved wasn't using Gmail.

So if they weren't going to build an app that they themselves were going to use, what was the point? That's what sputtered it down.

Guy: Yeah. I think if it had been a money thing, we would have kept going. We would have taken the route...

[crosstalk]

John: We would have sold out, all about the money.

Guy: I don't know why we're feeding his ego any more than that.

Dave: Let's keep talking about how right John is.

[laughter]

John: Or how great it is to work with me.

[laughter]

John: Let's get my wife on this podcast.

[laughter]

Guy: Yeah, exactly.

Dave: I'll give you a peek behind the scenes. The him always being right thing, he doesn't do that when it's design conversations. I'll give him credit for that.

John: I contributed all of the worst ideas.

[laughter]

Brent: But you're good at triggering the best ideas, and that's key, right? In fact, I think we're all good at that. We follow the McDonald's rule sometimes.

Dave: There are specific things we can point to, like I came up with the name and Brent came up with the way the archive thing moves. But for the most part, I look at Vesper as like a cloud of ideas and who was attached to which one is...it's so foggy, it's lost to me.

Guy: Yeah, that's the best way. The best projects I've worked on have always felt like that. Like, I try not to be dear to my ideas. Like, if I have a thought, and I express it, then it gets wrapped up in a project, and I feel that's the best way to work.

John: Yeah. Going back to the "Mad Men" thing, there's your idea, and then there's the idea. It seems like we're all pretty good about being invested in the idea and not our ideas.

Guy: Which one of you is Cutler?

[laughter]

John: We're all Don Draper.

Guy: God.

[laughter]

John: You know, it's funny. I think part of the genius that Steve Jobs had was -- and he obviously had an enormous ego, but he had this ability, and you hear these stories from dozens and dozens of people who worked with him over the years. It was that it wasn't always his way or the highway, although he acted like it was.

Because he'd come in the next day and offer your idea from yesterday that he told you was total shit. He'd say, "I've got it. I've got it. We'll put the button in the top," which is exactly what you told him yesterday. Then he'll just say it as though he came up with it overnight, and then it's at the top and you go on.

So he thinks he was right all the time, and it kept his view of the universe where he was always right correct. But he was actually changing his mind all the time.

Guy: Yeah. I kind of like that and I kind of hate that. But definitely effective.

John: I think it would wear thin over time, and you've got to...I think it's why so many people burned out. The people who surrounded him burned out. But it clearly helped elevate the work that he was leading to insanely high levels.

Guy: Yeah. I think that's a great way of putting it.

John: We have that, but I think all of us just admit, "Oh, man, my idea was garbage."

That was shit. Let's throw it out. If there's any one thing we got really, really good at, it was throwing things away. I mean that in a good way. We threw away a lot more work than we kept.

Guy: Yep. I think that's the best way to go. We did the same thing with Napkin. Napkin 1.0 was shipped, and most of the complaints, which were few compared to the compliments, were that we were missing features that we'd actually just ripped out. So I don't know.

I think shipping something very light for 1.0 and then building out is the right thing to do, because then you build what people want, rather than what you think people want.

John: Absolutely. I would so much rather hear after launch people say I want more instead of you got it wrong.

Guy: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John: I want to leave people wanting more so that we can go do that more and not just give them a bunch of crap upfront. It's pretty obvious to me, and to us, and I think to anybody who uses the app, what the things that we might put in are. But we wanted to focus on the product we were making. We wanted to make it as great as we could.

Rene: Did you have a timeline for shipping or a time period you wanted to hit or a minimum feature count? How did you know when you were getting close to shipping?

John: See, 1st of April. That was our ship date.

[laughter]

Dave: Yep. That flew right by.

Brent: 2013.

John: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah, 2013. [laughs]

John: So is it good or bad that we're two months late? Probably good, because I think April 1 was kind of an insane ship date, given when engineering started.

Dave: That would have been one month, yeah.

John: It wasn't preposterous. It wasn't like proposing that you're going to build a faster than light rocket ship or a boil the ocean type goal. But it was ambitious.

Dave: That sense of ambition helped us, though.

John: Right. So I don't think we're too late. We're a little later than we wanted to be, but not too bad.

Dave: Well, just like with the design itself, we would invent constraints. And by having to stay within those constraints, we always wound up with something better.

John: The thing that we ran into, and I've always run into it, and I think it gets back to the way that the three of us work so well together, is that this would happen and past projects with people who I didn't work as well with, they'd get exasperated at my sense of what I'm about to say. Then that added tension and friction to the team.

But what I would see over and over and over again is more or less we would attack the worst thing in the app. This is the worst thing of the things we know we have to do. Let's do this part now. We'd focus on it, and we'd work on it and iterate and iterate and iterate until it was one of the best parts of the app.

Then you look at everything in the app, and you say well, now, here's the worst part of the app. Now we'll do that. It's some other thing. You do this, you keep doing this. All of a sudden, you're back at that thing that you just started with, that used to be the worst, and you made it the best.

But now it's the worst thing in the app again. You think, "Well, is it good? You know, OK, now it's like the worst thing in the app, but can we ship this?" And then we'd all be in agreement, we can't ship it like this. And then we'd work on it over and over and over again.

Brent: I think that John and I have complementary forms of undiagnosed ADD, where one day it would be, "I think we should work on this. Let's talk about this." And I, almost like a puppy, would be like, "Yeah, that sounds great. Let's work on that."

The next day would be something else, and I'd get excited about, "Yeah, let's work on that." Very shiny objects. Enough days of this, and you iterate back through, and it ends up being a pretty good workflow. I think some people might be driven insane by that, but for us, it worked out pretty well.

Dave: Actually, I would say it's the opposite of ADD, though, because I feel like most of our days, the entire day was just focused on this one thing...

Brent: Well, sure.

Dave: ...instead of flitting about. I don't think it's ADD to think that the next day it's some other wildly different aspect of the app. To me, it's that you've taken this card from the bottom of the deck and put it on the top, but now there's some other card on the bottom, and it just sticks out like a sore thumb.

John: Well, I should explain. From my perspective, like getting to a certain point in the Photoshop document or in the design doc and then switching to a different topic before this thing is done. The way I'm used to working in the past is with people who want to take this thing and get it done and then move onto the next thing.

What we did a lot of was we'd get something to 99 percent and then run off to the other thing the next day and get that to 99 percent. We kept circling back to what we started calling the other 99 percent.

Guy: You're charging for the app, which shouldn't be controversial because it's...

John: I hope not.

Guy: Right.

John: I think it would be if we weren't.

Guy: Right. It's not a controversial at all. I want to talk with you guys about the race to the bottom. I know we've been on the call for a long time, but three superstars makes it easy to go along. Can you discuss app pricing and how you're approaching it?

John: Yeah, I think in broad terms and I think our mutual friend, Lex Friedman, had a good piece in "Macworld Magazine," the current print edition on app pricing in this race to the bottom and making I think a very strong case. I don't want to put words in Lex's mouth, but a strong case that this race to the bottom in app pricing. Nowhere is it more severe than the iPhone.

The Mac App Store, certainly prices are lower I think on Mac software than pre-Mac apps were, but it hasn't had this 99 cent, 1.99 race. Even the iPad it seems like it's not so much. But for some reason in the iPhone there's this seemingly intense pressure to be free or 99 cents.

Even letting aside what it means for developer revenue right now, and obviously the argument in favor of it is that you make it up in volume. It's not a total joke, like the old change bank joke on "Saturday Night Live," where all the bank does is make change. How do they make money? Volume.

[laughter]

John: It's a little bit of that. When you're only making 70 cents in revenue, or 69 cents, I guess maybe it even rounds down to. You're getting pretty close to trying to make money, making change on volume. Lex's argument is long term, that long term this is bad for users.

Even if you think you're saving money, because your apps only cost a dollar or two dollars. It's bad for you, in the long term, because it makes app development unsustainable, and it makes it unsustainable to keep reinvesting work in apps to make a 1.5 version that's really a lot better, and a 2.0, and a 3.0, and to keep the app up-to-date with new versions of the system.

I've just noticed, I think there's a correlation, if somebody wanted to dig in on the data. I think there's a correlation between the apps I still have on my phone that haven't been updated to fit the 4-inch iPhone screen and what they cost.

Right? That there's a couple of games that I bought for 99 cents, and they don't fit, and it will stick out like a sore thumb. Whereas maybe if they cost a little bit more, the developer would have an ongoing financial interest in keeping it up-to-date. I think it's a great argument.

This is something that we were on the same page with, right from the get-go, that we weren't sure what the price was going to be until the last minute. We had a range, and it was...This sound ridiculous, too, when you're talking about four, five, six-dollar apps as high prices, but way above the dollar, two-dollar range.

Rene: For me, as someone who buys apps, I want to be able to pay to get the quality of developers that I want. If I pay 99 cents, and developers can subsist, I'll get subsistence quality apps. I won't get the best and brightest people wanting to make apps for the platform that I'm using.

Dave: I think that the pricing is one promise to ourselves that we're going to keep working on this and, two, a promise to our users that we're going to keep working on this.

John: Brent had the most experience on this, though, and he hasn't said anything.

Brent: Pricing is difficult, and I haven't actually had that much experience with App Store pricing. I did a couple versions of NetNewsWire, and those sold fantastically well because for iPhone and iPad, both of them were on the App Store day one for their respective platforms, and that of course was just huge.

Then after that I didn't really look at sales figures. Then my most recent app was free. So clearly, despite decent volume, it didn't make that much money.

John: We're clearly going against the grain in some regards. I think we can get away with that in some ways because yes, we are debuting with a certain level of publicity that most apps don't debut with. But long-term, this app is not going to succeed financially if it's only purchased by people who have heard of me or Brent or even Dave. Dave's got the podcast, don't you have a podcast?

Dave: Yeah. Every so often.

John: If it's the people who know us. People who do know us and they find out that we've made an app together, I bet a lot of them are going to be excited, and they're going to buy it no matter what it is.

That's great, and I appreciate that. But if we only get that crowd, then we've failed. We need to have most of our users be people who have no idea who we are. Which would be just great.

We're certainly approaching that pricing-wise in a way that goes against the grain. If you look at the top-grossing apps in the App Store, they're almost all freemium. They're free apps with paid stuff. But they're also games. We're not after that. We're clearly not going to be the number one grossing app in the App Store.

We have no chance at it. We're not a game, we're not freemium. But I definitely think there's room in there for serious productivity tools that charge a reasonable price.

Dave: I think for a lot of those apps, they do this thing where they let their pricing be part of their marketing. The path we're taking is to let the marketing be the marketing and let the price be the price, keep them separate as much as we possibly can.

Rene: You're not targeting people for who the cost of the app is the primary feature.

John: Right. And you definitely lose people when you go above free, and you lose people when you go above 99 cents, and you lose more people maybe when you go above $1.99. But I don't think you lose people after that. I think after that, you've taken off the people who are super-super price sensitive.

It goes back to Çingleton, really, with Michael Jurewitz's terrific, absolutely terrific, almost a call to arms on app pricing, which is that don't lose revenue just for the sake of users. Gaining users without gaining revenues is a sucker's bet.

Rene: If you double your price and you lose less than half your users, you're making money.

John: Right. Exactly. And you're getting better users. You're getting users who are more willing to pay for quality.

Rene: Who appreciate value over just cost..

John: Right.

Dave: Right. The sort of people who are going to download a free app, give it one star and write obscenities on the Internet, those aren't the people who are going to be out there doing us the favor of talking about us our app.

John: If we don't get them, we've failed. But we want the people who when they go in to buy a pair of shoes, look for what looks like the coolest pair of shoes and try them on and then look and see what they cost, not the people who look at the price tags, price tags, price tags, "Ooh. This one's the cheapest. Do you have it in a size 12?"

Right? We don't want that. And there's certainly a market of that, and it's probably at the top of the grossing charts. But that's not what we're after.

Guy: You know, Napkin costs 40 bucks. We've got a four and a half star rating, I think, in the Canadian app store, last time I checked. I think a lot of that is because we do weed out all of the people that don't really appreciate what the app is about.

John: Well, by the time you spend 40 bucks, you've made an informed decision.

Guy: I think so, yeah. In the future we hope to have a lot more, or we will have a much better website in order to inform that decision better. But we get serious people, and they consider the app seriously, and they write serious reviews.

Frankly, we're kind of light on features, but we're building out, and all the updates are free. Them getting in early is good for us and good for them, I think.

John: You know this. We use it every day on [inaudible 01:52:45] , and it saves us so much time. We feel like we owe you more money for it.

Guy: You know what? I've heard from a lot of people who use it constantly, even people that are just surprised to use it every day. I'm pleased about that.

Brent: Do you have any numbers on piracy for Napkin?

Guy: No, I don't care.

John: That's a good answer.

Guy: I put in some fancy codes that explode if you try to pirate it.

[laughter]

Guy: But I haven't bothered tracking it. Do you guys care...?

John: You should make it so that if you detect that it's pirated it's like a dirty napkin.

[laughter]

Guy: A few stains all over it, yeah. That's a good answer. Right now it just explodes.

John: I had not even thought about piracy until just now. I just don't care.

Guy: You shouldn't. Don't worry about it.

John: The people who are going to steal it are going to steal it. There's nothing we can do. There's no sense in worrying about that anyway.

Dave: The same as the free customers, they're not the people you're targeting anyway.

John: Right.

Guy: It's a bit different on iOS. On a Mac you have to manually your receipt, the actual receipt. We do that. We check the signing and do some fancy stuff and then explode.

John: I have never once talked to a developer in my life. Maybe I don't know enough game developers. I don't know. I'm sure there are some markets where it might be. I've never talked to somebody who has said, "You know what I did? I spent a lot of time and effort trying to booby trap stuff for pirates, and boy was it worth it."

Guy: Games get pirated like crazy. Not to get too close to the talk show after two hours of chatting with you guys, but Marco's recent piece about Android development, I think you had a piece, too, John, about Android being harder to develop for than iOS.

John: Yeah, the BBC had a thing. Long story short, because the BBC is publicly held, they are accountable. There's like a council you can go to with complaints if you feel like they're favoring a certain commercial entity over another. A bunch of Android users...I don't know if it's even a bunch. Maybe it's just one angry person who went and filed a complaint...

[crosstalk]

Guy: ...Something triggered the Ombudsman basically.

John: Well, the BBC player app comes out with new features for iOS before it comes out with those same features for Android and doesn't support all Android devices, etc., and so forth.

This council that's sort of like an Ombudsman council found that the complaint had no merit because the BBC development team explained how in detail all of the reasons why this is so. It's easier to target iOS than...

[crosstalk]

Guy: It's a rational decision.

John: Right.

Dave: I think every developer we've had on [inaudible 01:55:40] who does both has expressed the exact same feeling.

Guy: Here's my one counterpoint. For games you make the same amount of money on Android that you do on iOS, and they are reasonably portable because the UI has nothing to do with the actual system.

John: I'm glad we didn't make a game.

Guy: Yeah, don't make games.

John: [laughs] Good advice.

Guy: Seriously, it's a very head driven business. What you're doing is simply better.

Brent: Napkin isn't a game either.

Guy: No. I'm not foolish enough to try to make a game.

John: I don't think I've ever had an original idea for a video game.

Guy: Do you play games at all?

John: Almost never. Letter Press and sometimes Nintendo games with Jonas, the Lego run around and bust up the Lego things with Jonas.

Guy: Yeah, that's fun.

Brent: You guys want to wrap up.

John: If you're not building something you're going to use yourself, you're going to be miserable and probably do a bad job at it. I don't really play games. Obviously, I think that's why I don't have game ideas. I have stupid thoughts I want to jot down a dozen times a day.

Guy: And you do.

John: Right.

[laughter]

Brent: Vesper makes no value judgment as to the quality of our ideas.

Guy: Let's wrap this up, because this could go forever. John, who are you and where can we find you?

[laughter]

John: I write a website at Daringfireball.net about stuff like this.

Guy: I'll check it out. Dave?

Dave: I have a podcast called Unprofessional. Unprofess.com, you can check that out.

Guy: That's it?

[laughter]

Dave: I didn't know where else to go with that. twitter@dwiskus.

Guy: That's fine. Brian? Oh, Brent?

[laughter]

Brent: Wow, somebody screwed up a name on this podcast and it wasn't Rene.

Rene: I took my thanks.

Guy: Easy laugh.

Brent: You can find my work at vesperapp.com and I blog at Inessential.com.

Guy: A little bit understated from all of you, but that's good. Thanks everybody for being on. It's been a blast. I honestly could go for like another two hours, but our listeners are going to get pissed off.

John: I can't believe that was two hours. It flew. I just assumed you'd trim it down to about 15 minutes. [laughs]

Guy: You know what, 11 minutes in I looked at the clock and I'm like, "OK, we're done. I'm done with the questions. Now can we just hang out?"...

Word processors like Microsoft Word and Apple's own Pages software are just dandy if you want to write a college paper or fax a cover sheet, but their focus is on page layout and text formatting. Text editors are an entirely different story. Text editors are much more helpful if you're editing code, creating web pages, doing text transformation or other things for which a word processor is just overkill. Here's a roundup of the best ones you can get for your Mac at the moment.

Also, if you're looking for editing software for the iPad, make sure to check out our Best writing apps for iPad roundup.

To start the list, here's a roundup of three free text editors that I think are worth your time. Each of them caters to a different audience: Brackets is great for the DIY crowd, while TextWrangler is a great multi-purpose general text editor. TextMate 2 has a lot of fans that prefer it to TextWrangler's big brother, BBEdit, for aesthetic and occasionally philosophical reasons.

Brackets

Brackets is an open-source text editor aimed at web designers and developers, and it's actually maintained by Adobe, of all people. It's developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and as the developers put it, "if you can code in Brackets, you can code on Brackets." And that's largely the idea: developers more than anyone have an idea of how they want to work, so why not provide them with a framework to do so?

The software features a quick inline editor so you can view your changes on the fly, thumbnail image previews, navigation and debugging tools, and more. It's an early release and very much a work in progress, but if you want to customize a text editor to do your bidding, Brackets is a good place to start.

• Free - Download now

TextMate 2

TextMate won the hearts and minds of app and web developers for having feature like nested scopes, folding code sections, project management, regex-based search and replace and more. The app's developer, Allan Odgaard, had long promised a 2.0 release but never delivered, then late in 2011 he made available a public build.

Then in 2012 something amazing happened: Odgaard released TextMate 2 as open source. He said he had long wanted to, he said, but Apple's restrictions on how apps can work on the Mac App Store pushed him over the edge. So the Mac App Store's loss is your gain.

• Free - Download now

TextWrangler

Bare Bones Software's BBEdit is the 800 pound gorilla of Mac text editors, and no wonder - it's been around forever, it seems. TextWrangler is BBEdit's "little brother," based around the same core text editing technology and designed for anyone that needs a text editing and transformation tool.

BBEdit offers much more extensive web authoring and software development tools, but that's not to say that TextWrangler skimps on features: you get grep-style search and replace, AppleScript support, authenticated saves, extensive FTP/SFTP support and much more.

• Free Download now

Here are three exceptional text editors that will cost you a little bit, but provide absolutely amazing capabilities depending on your needs.

BBEdit 10

Bare Bones Software's business has been built on the enduring success of BBEdit - its flagship text editor has been around for 22 years and is still going strong. BBEdit was originally designed as a programmer's utility for writing code, but has been modified in the intervening years to become an excellent web page editing tool as well.

The software features syntax highlighting for dozens of different languages, it's scriptable and recordable using AppleScript, features Perl-compatible regex support, sports built-in debugging tools, FTP and SFTP support, supports version control using CVS, Perforce and Subversion and has hundreds of more features besides. It is, quite frankly, overkill for many users, but for those of us who need it, it's indispensible.

• $49.99 - Download now

Coda 2

Most of the other text editors on this list are general purpose tools that can be used by someone developing an application or writing source just as much as someone working on a web site. Panic's Coda 2 is a horse of a different color: it's specifically designed to act as a text editor for web developers and designers.

Coda started out a simplified way to write web code and get it to where it needed to go - it combined editing, FTP client, a web preview engine and, if need be, command line terminal access. Panic's moved Coda way beyond that with the new release - the editor adds features like code folding, the UI has been reworked, source code can be managed with either Git or SVN, a new MySQL editor is available, and much more - more than 100 new features in all. Coda 2 has a gorgeous, easy to use interface that makes your web page writing and tuning a breeze. It also works marvelously with Panic's companion iPad app, cheekily named Diet Coda.

• $74.99 - Download now

Sublime Text 2

Sublime Text 2 is billed as "a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose," making it the only one on this list that recognizes plain old wordsmiths as worth of love from the text editing crowd too. It has an attractive user interface and neat features like the ability to make multiple selections and changes at the same time. I have to admit, when I began researching this topic, I'd never heard of Sublime Text 2, but after reading some forceful comments promoting it, I looked it up - it's pretty slick.

I especially like Sublime Text 2's "distraction free mode," a full screen mode that focuses on just your text on the screen and nothing else. Other cool features include split editing, a hideable command palette, and a very fair cross-platform per-user license that lets you pay for it once but use it on as many computers as you like, whether they be Mac, Windows or Linux. While you are required to pay for it, you can download and use it to test it out without penalty.

A new 3.0 version is currently in development, with boatloads more features.

• $70 - Download now

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list of text editors for the Mac, just a few of my favorites that I think are worth your attention. I imagine you have other ones that I may have missed, so please tell me about them in the comments.

Writedown is a newly released text editor for the iPhone and iPod touch that also has complete support for the Markdown format. Since Markdown is the preferred writing tool here on iMore, we're always keen to check out interesting looking new clients. Writedown is the project of Nguyen Vinh, and has seen some success over in Vietnam already. It looks great, and has some really nice features within that make it well worth a look, but at the same time it's pretty restricted as well.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Writedown is the pull-out Markdown crib-sheet. A simple swipe in from the right brings out a handy guide to the most common syntax that you'll need to put together a perfectly formatted Markdown document. Also of note is the cursor button, allowing you to scroll around documents with ease instead of jabbing your finger at the screen trying – and failing – to hit the right spot. It's beautifully designed, and won't look at all out of place in an iOS 7 world, and there's a bunch of customization features including a dark theme.

Textexpander support is also included, which makes Writedown a real production machine. Cloud syncing is taken care of via Dropbox, Google Drive or Evernote – no iCloud – and there's a whole heap of other apps that you can open your Writedown documents in as well as exporting to print, email and pdf.

So, a lot to like, but sadly some massively restricting areas that prevent this being the productivity tool of your dreams. Firstly, while hopefully just a bug to get worked out, if you leave the app and then come back in to carry on, the text in your document seems to magically disappear. Secondly, there doesn't seem to be an option to edit notes you've already created, again unless there's some bugs that need working out. I hope it's the latter.

Writedown has masses of potential, and some really nice features that make it worth taking a look at, but in greater amounts some frustratingly restrictive aspects. Hopefully the developer keeps up the hard work, because underneath the kinks, there's a great app waiting to get out.

• $0.99 - Download Now

Realmac Software on Tuesday released its newest Mac application, Ember. It's the successor to Realmac's screenshot-grabbing tool Littlesnapper, building upon that app's foundation but adding digital scrapbooking functions that make gathering digital images quick, easy and fun.

What Apple's iPhoto software does for digital photographs, Ember does for all the other digital imagery you may be interested in. If there are web sites or photo blogs that feature pictures you like, simply subscribe using their RSS or Atom feeds and Ember will keep you up to date on any new image additions.

If you're already familiar with Littlesnapper you'll instantly be comfortable with Ember; although the look and feel has been updated, the basic components are still there: a main library window with a sidebar organizing your digital images by source, along with screen capture tools that let you snap full screenshots, timed screenshots, areas and windows. Sure, those functions are built in to the Mac operating system, but Ember gives you a much easier way of cataloging, sorting and tagging them.

One other thing about Littlesnapper - Ember will import Littlesnapper libraries, as long as you're running a recent update to Littlesnapper.

In fact, if you're familiar with Realmac's offerings, you may remember that Ember already existed: It started life as a web service that Realmac shut down in 2011. With this app's full integration of content from the Web, and its prodigious cataloging tools, branding it as Ember makes a good deal of sense.

You never know when inspiration will strike you when you view an image online, so Ember has built-in support for RSS and Atom feed subscriptions. It'll push an OS X notification to let you know whenever it's updated one of your subscriptions with new images.

Ember has other built-in tools to make the images you collect useful; you can crop and rotate images; annotate them with text or freehand markups; look at images full-screen; organize your images into collections, or build "Smart Collections" that can contain all images with certain tags, ratings, web URLs, and other criteria; and you can share your images with others by e-mail, AirDrop, Messages, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, CloudApp or Tumblr. Ember will also read images on your iPad or iPhone.

Ember also has a built-in browser to grab images quickly from the web; cleverly, Realmac has made it possible to reset the width of the browser to meet iPad and iPhone dimensions. This is handy for web developers and others who might be capturing screenshots for clients, for example. However, the page is saved as an image, so the text embedded on that page isn't available to search on.

What's more, Realmac has developed extensions for both Safari and Chrome web browsers. With it installed, Safari adds a new toolbar button that lets you "snap" the web page and save it in the Ember library.

Some Littlesnapper customers are bound to be a bit peeved by Realmac's decision to launch Ember as a new app rather than offering it as an update. But software developers have to eat just like everyone else, and Apple offers no upgrade mechanism in the Mac App Store, so Realmac's left with little choice. This isn't just a rebranding, though: Ember has key new features that Littlesnapper didn't, making it a worthwhile investment for anyone who wants to organize and do more with digital images from disparate sources.

The Good

• Simple to use and very familiar for Littlesnapper users
• Lots of sharing options
• Powerful tagging and sharing features
• Library upgrade support for Littlesnapper

The Bad

• Saved web pages aren't searchable
• No upgrade path for Littlesnapper users
• Steep price

The Bottom Line

Realmac has taken what was already good about Littlesnapper and transformed it into a more powerful and diverse cataloging tool that will help digital pros and others gather and catalog images from the web or wherever else they might derive inspiration from.

• $49.99 - Download now

Byword, a popular writing app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, has been updated to version 2 and is more enjoyable than ever. Some of the new features include automatic downloads, full-feature offline support, better integration with other apps, and a premium option that lets you publish to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Scriptogram, and Evernote.

Byword offers a beautiful, distraction-free environment that lets you focus on your writing. It supports markdown by displaying formatting changes while you type as well as the ability to preview the final product and even export to PDF and HTML documents. In Byword 2, the Markdown preview has been updated to keep scroll position so that you can quickly see how the specific area you're working on will look fully formatted.

Dropbox support in Byword has also improved, and now you can rename, duplicate, and delete documents even while offline. All documents will also automatically download when connected to WiFi.

One of my favorite new improvements is that when on the Mac, Byword will now default to iCloud as the save location. This was the only thing keeping me away from Byword in the past, so I'm quite pleased with the idea of this feature. Unfortunately, iCloud sync isn't working very well. Nothing created on my Mac or iPad is showing up on my iPhone.

The biggest addition to Byword 2 is the new premium upgrade that allows you to publish to WordPress, Tumbler, Blogger, Scriptogram, and Evernote. You simply add a title, tags, categories, and custom URL and fields if you so desire, and hit publish! The upgrade is $4.99. Unfortunately, the upgrade is a separate purchase for each version.

The good

• All documents are now downloaded automatically when connected to WiFi for offline availability
• Full featured offline support in Dropbox including rename, duplicate and delete documents
• Move and duplicate documents between folders on iCloud, Dropbox and device storage
• Improved conflict resolution with visual inspection of each conflicting version
• Better integration with other apps via Open in…
• Keep scroll position on Markdown preview
• New font options and adjustable font size

The bad

• iCloud sync in unreliable

The bottom line

If you do any sort of writing, Byword is sure to be a fantastic tool that'll help you focus on your work. And since it syncs seamlessly between iPhone, iPad, and Mac with Dropbox or iCloud, you can have your work with you at all times, ensuring you don't forget that brilliant idea when you were standing in line at the grocery store.

• $2.99 for iPhone and iPad - Download now
• $9.99 for Mac - Download now

Most of what we do here at iMore is write. We put words up onto the internet, and millions of them a year. Managing what we write, however, across Mac, iPad, and iPhone, from idea to draft to final, can often be more complicated than we like, involving different sync solutions and different apps, not to mention our web-based content management system. Each of us has our own workflows, and our own toolkits to accomplish them.

Here's what we're using to write, right now...

Leanna Lofte, app and photography editor

I've had enough painful experiences losing work to learn that I need to write "offline" instead of directly in Drupal 7, the content management framework we use for iMore. My text editor of choice, right now, is iA Writer. It offers a clean, distraction-free environment that makes it easy for me to focus on my work. 90% of my writing is done on my iMac, 5% on my Macbook Air, and the other 5% on my iPhone and iPad. iA Writer uses iCloud to keep everything in sync making it easy to jump between devices. I'm also a fan of Byword, but since it doesn't automatically chose iCloud as the place to save, I've opted to use iA Writer -- there has been too many times I couldn't access something I needed on a device when I wasn't home.

One time, I actually used Siri to dictate an entire article while driving to work. It was a time-sensitive piece that I didn't quite have time to finish before leaving, so I grabbed my Macbook Air, dictated on my way, then hopped onto my laptop to paste and publish in the few minutes I had before class started.

Chris Parsons, editor-at-large

I don't really do any writing on my iOS devices. I do however; rely on Evernote for noting things I may need to remember later on and ideas that I come up with for articles. It all syncs up perfectly so when it comes time to refer to those notes and ideas, they're all on my Mac through the Evernote app or through the web login.

When it comes to getting down to business though, I'm really bad at concentrating and getting the task done some days. So, to help with that I cut my internet off and hop into WriteRoom. It's a pretty basic offering compared to a lot of other apps out there but it works for me, especially with the black theme.

Since it's just a blank, black page, you either write or go insane from boredom.

Peter Cohen, managing editor

I have tried, and failed, to use my iPad for writing ever since I bought it. Maybe if I had an external keyboard it would be different, but trying to write anything longer than a quick e-mail or a tweet using the on-screen keyboard is difficult for me. So I do almost all my writing on my Macs - a Mac Pro, MacBook Pro with Retina Display, or MacBook Air, depending on where I am.

I've written for the Web for almost two decades now, and I've used BBEdit for almost that long. No other text editor comes close for me when it comes to the flexibility and power I'm looking for to edit and transform text. At this point I'm pretty hard-wired to need BBEdit to be productive. I admit that I'm only using a small percentage of BBEdit's capabilities, but it's so finely customized for my workflow, I can't imagine using anything else.

I also appreciate that Bare Bones makes available TextWrangler, a free text editor that uses the same core technology as BBEdit. It makes it easier for folks who don't have the coin to buy BBEdit to use some of the same features. And it's a clever gateway drug to BBEdit, to boot.

Richard Devine, senior editor

If I need to just note down some ideas quickly, the stock Notes app on the iPhone or iPad is the go to choice. It syncs back to my Mac so my thoughts are there when I get back to the computer and start to get down to work.

In terms of the actual writing, I've been a fan of iA Writer for some time now. It's a basic text editor with iCloud sync, so like with Notes, all of my stuff is on all of my devices all of the time. I love the simplicity of iA Writer -- it's just text, no toolbars. I'm also a big fan of the focus mode that will highlight only the sentence you're working on and fading out the rest of your text. Really helps me to concentrate.

From there it's into iMore, add all the Markdown links and off to the Internet!

Ally Kazmucha, how-to editor

I do a good majority of my writing on my iMac. It's very seldom I actually write within an actual content management system such as Wordpress or Drupal. There's just been too much heartache when it comes to saving work and getting errors. It's never fun to lose things.

My weapon of choice is Byword. It uses iCloud to keep your documents in sync across all devices and has apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. While I spend most of my time writing on my iMac, there are times I want to get out of the house or the office and write at Starbucks or another local coffee shop. Instead of lugging around my MacBook Pro, I simply take my iPad and a keyboard case. Then when I get home, I just copy and paste everything where it needs to be and embed images. Since Byword supports markdown, I've already gotten all my links done ahead of time.

While Byword may not be the most powerful solution around, it does all I need it to do and it's a great option for students writing papers, editors, or anyone else that wants the flexibility of writing from multiple devices.

Rene Ritchie, editor-in-chief

I use a combination of tools, depending on what I'm doing and where I'm trying to do it. If I'm driving or otherwise occupied, I use Siri to quickly jot stuff down into Notes. That syncs between iOS and Mac, so at the very least I don't forget about or lose ideas (it's become a natural language clipboard of sorts). When attention isn't an issue, I use Drafts for the same purpose. Drafts lets me type or dictate ideas without having to worry about where it'll eventually end up. As I've said many times before, it's time-shift for text.

When I'm sitting down to write, all proper and formal like, it's almost always in BBEdit on the Mac. I don't even use 1% of its potential, but what I do use is so damn powerful I can pretty much accomplish anything text-based that I can imagine. I write in John Gruber's Markdown, so while the text is plain, it's also formatted and highly portable.

When I have to collaborate with Kevin from CrackBerry or Phil from Android Central, I'll have to use Google Docs. (Daniel from Windows Phone Central claims not to know what that is).

If I have my druthers, however, and I'm out and about without my Mac, I write in Elements, which is pointed at the same Dropbox folder I store my BBEdit work in. That lets me keep working no matter where, or on what device I'm on. If I'm on my iPhone and need to make quick changes on the go, I likewise use Elements.

Elements is just light and easy and killer for Markdown, and BBEdit is a beast. I also make heavy use of Text Expander, both on Mac and on iOS. It removes almost all the repetitiveness from writing and lets me get on with the creative work.

Together, I can get pretty much get done everything that needs doing.

How do you write?

Interestingly, none of us use Microsoft Word. Not even Apple's Pages. We're all using lighter, plainer solutions. Now none of our workflows are perfect. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, advantages and drawbacks. And all of them can likely be improved. So, if you work across a wide range of devices, let me know how you do it, and if you can think of any ways any of us could work better and smarter, let us know in the comments!

Paragraphs for Mac is a new markdown editor available in the Mac App Store that allows you to write your posts in markdown, including embedding images, and easily export them for publishing on your own via FTP. Not only does Paragraphs export your posts, it creates an entire site for upload.

First things first, if you're looking for a markdown editor that simply creates posts for you to upload to Wordpress, Tumblr, or Drupal, Paragraphs isn't it. You'd probably be better suited with a markdown editor such as Byword or iA Writer]. The premise of Paragraphs is that you don't already have a site readily set up or want a simpler solution for creating blog posts with one click publish options and obviously, markdown support.

After you first launch Paragraphs, you'll be asked to enter some basic info including the name of your site and the URL. You can also jump into preferences in order to choose a theme. There are 3 themes to choose from but you are welcome to create and edit these themes if you have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS.

After you've got a few posts written and your site preferences worked out, just click on the file menu and choose the Publish option in order to create an export file of your site. From here you'll need to use an FTP client to upload it to your web server. For those not familiar with FTP and have no idea how it works, Paragraphs may not be the best option for you. For those who have an intermediate knowledge of publishing websites and want an easier way to publish changes and updates to their site, Paragraphs may be a perfect solution.

The good

• Easy to use interface with options that are straight forward and easy to find
• Auto-complete while writing markdown makes for a nice time saver
• Publishing/exporting is clean and fast

The bad

• No support or import for popular blogging platforms
• Existing blog owners probably won't want to change what they're doing or start over
• Not a lot of explanation which may frustrate some users

The bottom line

Paragraphs does what it says it does, creates an easy solution for publishing to a static website without a cookie cutter content management system like Wordpress.

When it comes to professional bloggers who write frequently, you'll most likely be better served with a service like BBEdit or MarsEdit that ties into your chosen platform or CMS. If you prefer a simpler editor, like I do, where you can simply preview and copy/paste markdown into your blogging platform of choice, both Byword and iA Writer offer this plus iPhone and iPad counterparts with iCloud sync.

That may leave you wondering who Paragraphs is suited for.

My answer would be for people somewhere in the middle that have some kind of working knowledge of FTP and prefer a more personal solution instead of a template blog on Wordpress or Tumblr. If you want a static website that you can edit and control locally and update with a simple FTP client, Paragraphs is for you.

• $14.99 - Download Now

Literature and Latte's newest application for OS X is called Scapple, and it's now available for download. It's a really helpful utility for visually-oriented users who want to get some ideas down but might feel hampered by traditional outlining tools and text editors that enforce some sort of linear structure.

Scapple is lets you jot down ideas on an ever-expanding virtual paper, then examine the ideas' relationships to one another and organize them. Mind mapping software does this, but Scapple's developers are quick to distance their app from that bunch. Scapple, they say, is more of a "freeform text editor" that works in a very non-linear fashion.

Getting started with Scapple is easy - just double-click and start typing. A two-page QuickStart Guide PDF is available from the Help menu to give you an overview of Scapple's functions - I heartily recommend checking it out first.

An inspector window gives you control over text attributes including alignment, typeface, size and style, fill colors and borders. Once you have some ideas down and you'd like to relate them to one another, you simply drag and drop them onto one another to establish a link. Scapple will, by default, use a dashed line, but if you want to specify arrows instead, you can.

You can "stack" notes neatly on top of one another, and create background images to group collections of thoughts or ideas. As your document gets more complex, Scapple zooms out, so you never run off the edge of the "paper."

Text isn't all that Scapple does, however. You can drag in images, mathematical formulae, even entire documents, which Scapple will attempt to import. Exporting is simple, too - you can export your document including PDF, PNG, OPML and a variety of text formats.

Literature and Latte's previous effort, Scrivener is a favorite of tool of many writers I know. It's especially well suited to the development of long-form content: research papers, novels and short stories, or feature article for blogs or magazines. The developers really understand the creative process of writing - collecting research, developing ideas, and assembling a structure that works.

Scapple is a natural extension of the philosophy behind Scrivener, and it complements Scrivener excellently. But it's really useful and handy on its own, as well. If you're looking for something that can act as a virtual whiteboard for all your ideas, make sure to check out Scapple. A trial version is available from the developer's web site, and if you buy the version available from the Mac App Store, you'll be able to synchronize documents in iCloud.

• $14.99 - Download Now

EverClip for iPad is an app that allows you to clip various things from across the internet as well as many third party apps. Once you've clipped it, you can launch EverClip and automatically send it straight to your Evernote account right from your iPad. This can include links, any amount of text, images, and more. If you like to keep track of things in your Evernote account, EverClip can make getting the content there even easier.

The premise of EverClip is simple enough. You'll first be asked to link the app to your Evernote account and from there you're ready to start clipping. You can launch any app that allows you to copy text and images to your clipboard. This includes Safari, Mail, Photos, and pretty much any third party app. There are some apps that are a little painful but not many. For example, Facebook doesn't allow you to natively copy photos so you'll have to save them to your camera roll and copy them from there. It may be a little annoying, but it's workable. This isn't a limitation of EverClip, but of Facebook itself. You may come across this scenario with some third party apps but most allow you to copy content so it isn't an issue that'll present itself frequently.

Once you've copied an item you'd like to save in EverClip to your clipboard, just launch the app and you'll see it automatically appear. Tapping on it will show you its contents and the clip in its entirety. From here you can easily export it to your Evernote account by tapping on the share button in the upper right hand corner. You can also tap the edit button and a new menu will appear in the lower right hand corner that allows you to manually add media or text notes.

EverClip remains aware of what you're copying if you have it opened and running in the multitasking tray, when you copy an item you'll automatically hear a sound that indicates that it's been copied to EverClip. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. If you're copying text or media for another purpose that you may not want in EverClip, you'll have to delete it or remember to close EverClip when you're done. If you clip a lot of things you want, it may be a good thing. You'll just need to remember to close it out when you don't want it saving copied items.

The good

• Great interface that makes it easy to find content quickly
• Import to Evernote is fast and images format correctly when imported
• Copies items in the background when you have EverClip running in the multitasking tray

The bad

• You'll have to remember to close EverClip out from the multitasking tray when you aren't using it or everything will be copied, it's a good thing and a bad thing
• Apps like Facebook don't allow copy so you'll have to save to your camera roll and then copy to clip in EverClip

The bottom line

EverClip is a great buy for anyone who routinely needs to save content to Evernote. Instead of manually copying and pasting into new notes, EverClip can do the heavy lifting for you. The persistent background copying could be an issue for some users but it's somewhat of a double edged sword. You may end up copying things you don't mean to but for convenience, to take it away could hinder some users.

For what it is, EverClip works great and imports content accurately and efficiently. Users that depend on Evernote heavily for importing information will find it more than a worthwhile purchase.

• $5.99 - Download Now
• $2.99 - iPhone version - Download Now

Write for Dropbox is a brand new text editor for iPhone that lets you create notes on the fly quicker than ever. With extensive gestures, markdown support, lots of sharing options, and a beautiful interface, Write for Dropbox may just be the best text editor for iPhone we've ever seen.

When first launching Write for Dropbox, you'll be taken through a short tutorial of how to use gestures and the editor bar. All of which are straight forward and easy to remember. Now you're ready to start writing.

The first thing you'll notice is the editor bar that appears above the keyboard. You'll find commonly used symbols as well as a handy cursor tool that allows you to move the cursor around the screen without having to actually move your entire hand off the actual keyboard. Sliding the editor bar to the left reveals markdown options such as bold, italics, headers, links, and more. You can also insert images and preview markdown with the two icons to the far right in the markdown editor bar.

Write for Dropbox makes simple tasks just as they should be, simple. Expanding to full screen can be done by simply pulling the screen outwards with two fingers. You can access the top menu again by pushing inwards with two fingers. Deleting notes and saving them are also extremely quick and use pull to refresh actions. Naming a note is as easy as tapping in the title bar. It's little things like these that you really learn to appreciate as they can be huge time savers.

As far as sharing goes, Write for Dropbox supports tons of options including Evernote, Google Drive, CloudApp, and more. You can copy links to your clipboard as well for easy sharing on social networks such as Twitter.

Write for Dropbox creates a default folder called Write in your Dropbox account. You can add folders inside this one natively inside the app as well as create notes inside of it. They'll then sync and organize as you left them in your Dropbox account. You can also favorite notes for quick access later.

One of the biggest things when it comes to saving notes and using them across platforms is the ability to pick up where you left off on another device. For this, Write for Dropbox offers a free Mac plugin that allows you to quickly take notes on your Mac and they'll sync down to your iPhone. It isn't a great solution and not as powerful as a fully functionally Mac editor but it gets the job done for short notes and lists.

The good

• Best interface of any iPhone text editor we have ever seen
• Gesture controls make simple tasks even simpler
• Sharing options aplenty, you'll be able to get your content to any platform or app you need to
• Fast syncing, like super fast
• Markdown support and the text editor bar are well laid out and make more sense than most

The bad

• No iPad support, I really like to write on my iPad and this app would be amazing on the iPad
• No full Mac support and quick notes are about the limit right now
• You can't move documents to a new folder after they're already created, unless I'm missing something

The bottom line

Write for Dropbox is not only the most beautiful text editor I've ever seen for iPhone, it's the best. Everything from the menus to the gestures to the text editor bar are easy to use and the care and thought that went into creating them is obvious. The only down side is that there is no iPad or Mac version at this time which will keep me with Byword on those platforms for the time being.

If Write for Dropbox can deliver the same on iPad and Mac, there's no doubt that it'd be the best editing suite available.

$1.99 - Download Now

Day One for iPhone and iPad, the popular journaling app by Bloom Built, has been updated with the ability to export your journal entries as a PDF that can then be sent to iBooks, Dropbox, your printer, and more.

To create a PDF, you go to Settings > Export to PDF. You can then choose a date range and if you want to only include entries containing specific tags. The created PDF looks just like how your entries look in the app. To share to other apps, just tap the Share button in the upper right hand corner. Any apps with PDF support that you have installed will appear on the list, including print.

Some other new features of Day One include a new reminder sound, Sanchez as a font option, improved header and HTML styling, and historical weather has increased from 3 days to 30 days.

This update of Day One has also added a faster startup time, improved Dropbox sync for large journals, refactored and improved sound effects, and reorganized Settings.

In the update notes of Day One for iPhone and iPad, they have also promised to update the Mac version soon with location, weather, tags, and more.

If you're a Day One user, go grab the update now. Do you plan to use the new PDF export feature? What do you think of the other new features? Personally, I'm just excited for the Mac update -- been waiting for it forever!

• $4.99 - Download now

Letterpress by Atebits, the word game darling of geeks everywhere, has been updated to version 1.3. New features include the ability to shake to shuffle letters (credited to developer Loren Brichter's wife -- don't ask about the dance!), a new high-contrast theme, the ability to view replays in Safari or Chrome, and some behind the scenes awesomizing of an undisclosed nature.

If you're already playing Letterpress, grab the update now. If not, head on over to the App Store and try it. It's free, and it's spectacular.

• Free - Download now

little memory is a an app that helps you remember the little things in your life by showing you what happened in your life exactly one year, month, or week ago. Every day, you simply make a small entry of what you'd like to remember and once you have enough entries, little memory will show you past memories. It's easy to remember big things, but little memory will help you remember small things like that trip you took to the park with your baby when she thought woods chips were simply amazing.

To help you remember to make a daily entry, little memory will send you a notification at a specific time every day. For many people, you'll probably want to choose a time at the end of the day when the kids are in bed and you're winding down before bed, as this is when you'll be most likely to actually make an entry. The beauty of little memory is that it actually restricts you to short entries (max of 210 characters) so keeping up with your journaling doesn't feel like a chore.

In addition to text, little memory also allows you to attach one photo to each entry, adding a visual element to your memories. What's great about this is that if you can't think of what you'd like to add for the day, you can simply browse through the photos you took that day since you only take photos of things you think are interesting. Then you can add a sentence or two about why you took the photo. Unfortunately, little memory only includes 7 photo credits and you must purchase a subscription to get an unlimited number of them. You are able to view your memories on the web, so I assume that's why they don't allow unlimited photos to begin with.

If you like, you can share you memories with your friends over email, messages, Facebook, or Twitter. I definitely see myself sharing past memories about my kids with my husband so that we can think back to those special moments together.

In addition to seeing old memories, little memory will also give you insights about your entires that looks for patterns like commonly used words and emotions so that you can see a snapshot of what you write about most and how you're feeling. These insights go back 3 months, but if you signup for the previously mentioned subscription, you can go back to when you first started using little memory.

A subscription to a premium little memory account is $3.99 per month, $22.99 per 6 months, or $42.00 per year. Don't let these prices scare you off, though, as little memory is very usable without a subscription plan. I wouldn't even consider signing up until I had been using the app for at least 3 months.

The good

• see what happened in your life a year/month/week ago
• daily reminders, so you don't miss a day
• attach a photo to a memory
• be inspired by your own words with a morning notification
• all your memories are private and personal (requires password)
• see the length of your longest streak of memories
• see insights of words used and emotions graphed over time
• invite your friends via email, messaging, facebook, or twitter
• get an archive of all your memories for your own backup/safe keeping
• easily share your memories over email, messaging, facebook, or twitter

The bad

• Only includes 7 "photo credits". To get more, you must purchase subscription
• Can't choose how photos get cropped

The conclusion

I just picked up little memory, today, but I look forward to using it on a daily basis. I love to blog and journal, but it's often times a bit of a chore to actually do because I feel obligated to put in at least a little bit of effort. With little memory, all I need to do is enter a sentence or two about something I want to remember about my day (good or bad) and I'm done! I have a habit of spending a few minutes on my iPhone while laying in bed every night, so this is when I plan to make my entries. I can't wait until I start seeing past memories.

$1.99 - Download Now

Whether you're a hardcore iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad gamer or just need something to kill time or secretly make meetings less deathly dull, word games are not only addictive but available by the truck load in the App Store. Letterpress, Words With Friends, and Scrabble are all equally addictive and, frankly, no-brainer buys. But even if they're cheap or free, no one has unlimited time so the question becomes, which iOS word game is the best?

Letterpress vs. Words With Friends vs. Scrabble: Gameplay

Letterpress by Atebits is a completely new twist on word games and reminds me of the popular iOS game, Welder. When you launch Letterpress for the first time, you're given a description of how to play. From there you can start a game with any of your friends on Game Center. After you start a game you're presented with a brightly colored five by five grid of letters. The object of the game is to create words out of the letters you're given. Each word must be at least two letters long and the same word can't be played twice. You also can't play a prefix of a previously played word (so you can't play MARBLE if someone has already played MARBLES). Once you create a word you can submit it, the tiles on the board will turn blue. Your opponent's tiles will show up red. (Assuming you're using the default theme.)

The game ends when all tiles on the board are colored. Then, whomever has the highest score wins. To gain an edge over your opponent you aim to surround a letter with your color. That will lock the surrounded tile to your color (visually it looks darker or more intense). Your opponent can still use that tile to make words, but gets not points for it.

Even though the game is ridiculously simple, it's extremely addictive and can vary greatly in challenge depending on the skill of your opponent. The real key it to try and lock in as many tiles as you can or your competitor will just steal them right out from underneath you.

An in-app purchase lets you unlock themes and have multiple games going on at once.

Words With Friends, purchased by Zynga, is socially aware version of Scrabble. Once you start a game your letters are available along the bottom of the screen, as well as a few options and the current score. The object is to use all your tiles before your opponent, and get the highest score for words you play.

Along the board are colored areas labeled with letter codes such as DL, DW, TW, TL, etc... These are areas that award double or triple points. If none of your current tiles allow you to play, you can swap them out but it'll use one of your turns to do so. Using all your tiles in one play also earns you additional points.

Zynga being Zynga, Words With Friends also has a few add-ons you can purchase to enhance game play such as Tile Pile which will tell you what tiles are remaining in the game. The Word-O-Meter will also give you the ability to see how strong your word is before you play it. You can choose to buy them as you need them or purchase infinite use of them for a one time fee of $14.99.

A game of Words With Friends ends when you or your opponent completely runs out of tiles. And just as in traditional board games, you'll be docked for any tiles you have remaining at the end of the game.

Scrabble by Hasbro is exactly what you'd expect from a digital version of the popular Scrabble board game. Even though Words with Friends was made to be very much like Scrabble, there are a few key differences in the original. The main one is that you have the option to play with 3-4 opponents instead of just one in Words With Friends (or Letterpress).

As far as game play goes, you get the exact same letter coded board you see in a traditional game of Scrabble as well as what you see in Words With Friends. You want to go after the coded tiles to maximize your score wherever possible. And as expected, the game will end when a player runs out of tiles.

Unlike Words with Friends, which charges extra for it, Scrabble shows you to the bottom right of the word exactly how many points you'll get for playing that word. Of course you can always do the math inside your head but most likely, you'd rather just know than sit their guessing or figuring out how many points a word will score you.

When it comes down to game play, which game you prefer is going to be a personal preference. Words With Friends and Scrabble are very much alike (again, Words with Friends was made to be like Scrabble). Words With Friends, however, is more fluid, is arguably a better designed app, and seems to attract more players.

While Scrabble is the original, I did have trouble finding friends that were using the Scrabble app which meant I ended up playing against random opponents more often than not.

Letterpress is a completely different kind of word game. If you're tired of Scrabble or Words with Friends and want a fresh take on the word game genre, Letterpress is it.

Letterpress vs. Words With Friends vs. Scrabble: Multiplayer support

Letterpress has built-in Game Center support which lets you match up with any Game Center friends or helps find you a random opponent. As of now, Game Center is the only way to match up with people or find friends. There's no Twitter or Facebook support. Since most people probably don't have a lot of friends using Game Center, you'll either have to bug them to join, or settle for getting matched up with random people.

Words With Friends has both Twitter and Facebook integration which makes it easy to find friends to play against. From within the app you can easily view which friends on your social networks are already playing Words With Friends. If you're in the mood to play a quick game or can't find anyone to play with, you can also choose to match a random opponent off of Words With Friends' own servers.

Scrabble tries to push its own native game play service, Origin, which is anything but user friendly and can actually be downright annoying. The up side is that Scrabble also has support for Facebook, single player against the computer, and random opponents. Even so, I've found it extremely hard to find actual friends playing the game where tons of my friends are playing Words With Friends. I'm not sure if this is just contributed to good marketing on Zynga's part or if people just prefer Words With Friends. Either way, if you're looking to play more than a one on one game, Scrabble is your only option. So again, if you're okay with playing against random opponents, you won't be affected but if you prefer playing against people you actually know, Words With Friends is a better choice.

Words With Friends supports multiple platforms across both iOS, Android, and computer as well as integration with both Facebook and Twitter which makes the odds of you finding a friend to challenge quickly much more likely.

Letterpress vs. Words With Friends vs. Scrabble: Pricing

Letterpress is available now in the App Store for free and is a universal download for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch The only limitation on the free version is that you can only play two games at once. A $0.99 in-app purchase removes the two game limit, adds themes, and gives you access to previously played word lists. At $0.99 you really can't beat it.

Words With Friends offers a free version of their iPhone app, but unless you want to be inundated with annoying popup ads, you'll probably want to purchase the $2.99 version. If you'd like it for the iPad, you'll need to shell out an additional $2.99 for Words With Friends HD. Both the free and the paid version have the same default feature set but the paid version makes the ads go away.

There are additional add-ons that you can buy as in-app purchases such as the Word-O-Meter and Tile Pile. You can purchase each at $2.99 which will give you 99 Word-O-Meter uses or 10 Tile Pile uses. The Ultimate Play Pack will get you unlimited use of these features plus Word Count for $14.99 which seems quite steep in my opinion.

Scrabble has a free, ad-supported version as well as a paid version for iPhone and iPod touch for $1.99. If you'd like to add the iPad counterpart you'll have to fork over an addition $9.99 which is far more than the Words With Friends iPad counterpart. Aside from that, there aren't really any other additional expenses to incur. So depending on which features you want to be able to use, Scrabble may be a cheaper option in the long run.

When it comes to price, Letterpress has the best offering across iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. At $0.99 to unlock every feature the game offers, there's no contest.

Letterpress vs Words With Friends vs. Scrabble: The bottom line

Letterpress, Words With Friends, and Scrabble are all great for killing time and can be incredibly addictive. While Words With Friends and Scrabble are very much the same game with different interfaces and price points, Letterpress is very different. Not only is the concept different but the actual game play experience is completely different.

Words With Friends has the largest network of any of its competitors and considering you don't really need all of the extras in order to play, it isn't a bad deal. Unless you're friends are Game Center geeks, this is where they'll likely be.

Scrabble just doesn't have the network or fluid experience that Words With Friends does which makes it hard to recommend over its competitor. Unless you absolutely want to play against up to 4 people at once, you're better off playing something else.

Letterpress is a refreshing take on word games. While options beyond Game Center would be nice, the quick pace makes it the best time killer of the bunch.

If you're into classics, go with Words with Friends and also try out Letterpress. If you want something new, just go with Letterpress.

Letterpress - Free - Download Now

Words With Friends - $2.99 - Download Now

Scrabble - $1.99 - Download Now