Interesting idea, but poorly executed

The idea of different modes for different stages of writing is an interesting idea. Handling the change in modes through a change in file extension is not a terribly good idea. If my file is a text file written with markdown then I would prefer for the file extension to remain .md so other apps that handle markdown recognize it as such. Moving between modes does not feel particularly intuitive either.

There doesn’t appear to be much logic to the workflow, and a lot of weird behaviours to the way things are work. For example, if you are in write mode and you select preview from the view button you get what you would see in read mode, but with a little x in the bottom left. When I tried to tap on the little x in the bottom left my document closed all together. I appeared as if there was no way to get out of preview mode without closing the document. What had actually happened was that I had accidentally dragged slightly when I tried to tap the x and when you are at the top of a document you can drag down to close the document. This behaviour, though possibly convenient at times, seems like it would be problematic in more situations than it would be useful, as in the example given. Further, if the behaviour is used in the preview mode it should close the preview and return you to the write view that you were in, not take you back to the documents list.

The whole app feels similar. There are a lot of features that feel like they could have been implemented much more simply and consistently given a bit more thought. Mode switching could be better, or quite possibly is just a bad idea no matter how you do it. The only mode you really need in a markdown app is a preview/reading mode. Everything else you can do with the app could be needed at any stage of writing. If the only point of the different modes is to track the state of your document and keep your files organized, then using the file extension to do that is not a good solution. The most disappointing thing is that the standard version of iA Writer is not getting as much attention now that this version has been released. I would rather see an update to the standard version with some of the features in this version integrated in without the awkward workflow.

Fleet117 about iA Writer, v1.4