The important thing is that everything can read and write to the same place, and that place is Dropbox. On the Mac side I work primarily in nvALT, but I could just as easily start directly in BBEdit or TextEdit and simply save that file to my Notes folder in Dropbox. I might create a note in an iOS app - usually Drafts - but my notes sometimes begin as highlights and comments on an article saved in Instapaper through Instapaper notes, or the file could begin life as margin notes on Kindle. I use a folder (very originally named Notes) in Dropbox as my Everything Box. It also means that if I want to switch apps, I have elements that I may need to revise or migrate in the future, which is one of the problems that writing in plain text was meant to avoid. I don’t want to use a special syntax that works only in that app, because then I lose the fluidity of changing apps whenever the task or the situation dictates. I don’t want to have to export for the same reasons. I don’t want to import my files into an app, because then I have to keep track of two versions of files, or fully commit to having the canonical version in a proprietary format or location. That means that the ease of using different writing tools for different tasks on the same file is just not possible the way iCloud currently works. With the changes introduced in the iOS 11 Files app, you can access text documents, but you can’t edit them in-place you must send a copy to another app. In iCloud, each app gets its own file bucket and no other app can normally access it. The problem from the user side is that iCloud is not a replacement for Dropbox.

I don’t mind paying for good apps, and I understand why going with a platform-native API is preferable in many cases. Sync has become valuable because it’s viable, and since it’s valuable, it can be a source of revenue. With iCloud sync, app developers don’t have to depend on the cooperation or existence of a third party solution like Dropbox.Īpple’s expansion of the types of apps that can charge subscription fees is the other change driving cross-platform development. I think one of the main reasons that many developers are now expanding their offerings to Mac apps for cross-platform integration is because of Apple’s improvements to iCloud sync. The main problem with switching to one of these apps is that my writing process is antithetical in one way or another to how Ulysses or Bear want me to work. I use mostly nvALT, with BBEdit for some tasks, and have Marked 2 as my preferred previewer/converter on macOS. My preferred apps for writing on iOS are still Drafts and Editorial. These are both excellent apps, but I have not adopted either of them for writing on macOS or iOS. While I have been happy with Editorial, it has been a while since it was updated, and so I re-evaluated my options when new versions of Bear and Ulysses came out recently. These new-wave editors have macOS counterparts that integrate coss-platform. 1 While past iOS apps could sync files, most of them didn’t have OS X / macOS versions, leaving that to built-in tools like TextEdit or third-party text editors like BBEdit or TextMate. Text editing apps have been a very popular category of the iOS App Store from the beginning, but there has been a recent second wave of note-taking and writing apps that support Markdown.

(Full disclosure, one of the links in that Tedium article points to my post, “Standard” Markdown Controversy on this blog, which is how I found it.) I always feel like my words deserve a better vessel, something that will allow me to write them faster, more efficiently, and with as little friction as possible. Every one of my articles starts out in this app (or at least in John Gruber’s neglected gift to the world), and yet, I always find myself looking for another option, periodically launching into a Google deep dive that rarely leads to a better solution. I’m writing these opening lines in Markdown, using a Mac app called Focused, one of many attempts to rethink the word processor as a minimalist exercise. In short, Bear looks like a thoughtful notebook-style writing app, but it doesn’t really fit with how I work today.Īnd in part by “Bare-Metal Writing: What Our Word Processors Are Missing”: It doesn’t sync with Dropbox and makes some styling choices (like hiding the content of Markdown links) that I don’t really appreciate. I can configure it to be a usable text editor, but it really wants me to use its internal tagging and linking system, and that’s not how I want to work. Though people have raved to me about Bear, I don’t think it’s for me. Prompted in part by Jason Snell’s article, “My iOS writing app of the moment is Editorial”:

Nvalt vs notational velocity