Writing Tools

Sundays are a slow news day, so I thought I’d spend today’s “bloglet”* sharing what apps I use to write. I admit this is pretty self-indulgent but maybe, dear reader, you’ll find some kinship in these words.

First, my “daily driver”; Obsidian. It’s a free app (for personal use) that runs almost anywhere; phone, desktop, and tablet. It’s my stalwart companion as I write technical notes, documentation, and D&D campaigns, as well as where I draft these bloglets. It stores each note as a Markdown file, which is just plain text, and formats text as you write it. The Markdown format is excellent; it walks that line between enabling structured formatting, while not being so flexible that you can end up with a soup of complexity. I grimace whenever I receive a Word document that contains headers that have all been manually sized with indentations tabbed in, instead of using proper semantic formatting. Many colleagues feel similar, and it’s been easy to sell Obsidian and Markdown to them.

My second favourite is Apple Pages. It makes it easy to produce good looking documents with little effort. I’ve used it to write large documents including a business plan. It’s also free, though there is a subscription option for templates. However, there are some mind-boggling limitations, with the most offensive being that you can’t orientate different pages differently. They all have to be portrait or landscape throughout a document. I do have to warn you however; you might find yourself jumping back to Word. I’ve had to ditch Pages when working with particularly complex documents. But whenever I write with Pages, I come away feeling happy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a similar experience with Word. I start with Pages and migrate if I need to.

The final tool is Apple Notes. The sharing feature is excellent. I use it all the time with my partner to write shopping lists, and we have a running note focused on home improvements. Though, I don’t understand how people drive it as a daily note tool as I find the macOS version to be a little buggy. The autocomplete is also incredibly aggressive which is distracting and flow disrupting. It’s also locked down so manually exporting notes is the only way to jump ship. With all that in mind my usage tends towards the iPhone, or if I just need a quick scratch pad.

Honourable mention; Apple Journal. I’ve given that its own blog post already about how annoying I find it, but it’s still an app I use each day.

And that’s it! I’d be interested to know of other apps out there that people recommend, so let me know on Mastodon.

* Bloglet is what I’m calling these posts, as they’re short and usually focused on something current.