H Bay

The newly released text editor iA Writer is using a minimum amount of features in order to make writers focus on the essential and being more productive in what really matters… writing. iA Writer re-invents the text editor. Watch the video.

Icons and menu tool boxes are OUT, shortcuts (which are faster and therefore increase productivity) are IN again. It reminds me of the old days when I was using the simplistic text editor vim in order to write C++ code. However, with iAWriter there are much less shortcuts to learn than with vim as the main task of iA Writer is not to code, but to write. I was a great fan of vim as it is one of the most powerful text editors for coders while being extremely simple. Now, I am a great fan of iA Writer for similar reasons. Simplicity and focus, which both increase productivity.

What I also like is the courage of the inventor Oliver Reichenstein (Twitter: @iA) to underdo his competition. He was aware that with the given resources he could never beat Microsoft Word by building a software with even more features. Therefore, he built a really simple tool with almost no features, stripped down to the essential, but still extremely powerful.

iA Writer is not the only tool I like because of its siplicity. The productivity tool Things is probably the most used app I have. I use it for Desktop and on my iPhone where I use it more than phone calls, or text messages. It is just great.
I am not paid by iA Writer, and I don’t know Oliver personally even if we are both Swiss and Switzerland is small . I write this because I like iA Writer and because I want to test my new gadget. Meaning that this post is obviously written with iA Writer . There is one thing missing. A shortcut for links. I am tired of writing href=”http://…