iA / Word and GitHub

Year: 2018

Word and GitHub

– iA Writer 5.2 offers premium Microsoft Word export for markdown and lays the ground for a great iOS GitHub synchronization.

Writing Fonts: A Typographic Christmas

– The next update of iA Writer does some extreme typographic acrobacy. It comes with three variable fonts which give us 1000s of grades. This allows us to adjust the weight of the font depending on size, device and background color. Additionally, we adjust the line height and spacing depending on column width and type size. The crazy part is that you probably won't see any of this. But you might feel it.

Write to Organize

– Creating the latest update to iA Writer was a slow burn. Beginning with some basic maintenance and then improvements for the new iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, the Kraken was released in the final weeks of preparation. The all new Tags and x-callback-urls are so hip they'll take you to funky town.

Aesthetics

– As the success of design has become measurable, it has transformed a handicraft into an engineering job. Not the master designer but the user is the arbitrator of good design. The key performance indicator is not beauty but profit. As financial and technical performance was gained, beauty left the stage. Now it feels like something is missing.

Designed in China, Assembled in California

– As China starts outdoing us economically, technically and strategically, we are turning Chinese, slowly losing the spiritual, cultural and political texture that made us different.

Eight Languages Wrapped in Wallpaper

– Both iA Writer for Mac and iOS are localized in English, German, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. For this update, we've decided to add a little present: 17 beautiful wallpapers for your desktop, mobile phone, or tablets.

A New Document Library

– iA Writer for Mac, version 5.0, is now available for download in the Mac App Store. It comes with a brand new document library, and apart from English, German and Japanese, it now also speaks French, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and Portuguese.

Mac with Tabs

– This update to iA Writer brings support for tabs in macOS High Sierra. Version 4.2 also comes with a subtle UI polish in typography and transitions, all in preparation for the big 5.0 upgrade.

Take the Power Back

– You may have heard that the best way to deal with the “information overload” is to switch off your devices. To take a break from the Internet. Go for a run. Roll out the Yoga mat. Read a book. Talk to your friends. Switching off is good advice. But eventually, you’ll be back. How about changing? Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link. Take the power back.

iOS: Backups for Dropbox, Google Drive and Co.

– iA Writer 5.0.5 for iOS introduces a fail-safe backup system for any documents opened from other applications. This means if you’ve opened a file from Dropbox, Google Drive or any other storage provider, everything you write in iA Writer is preserved—no matter what.

Computer Poetry

– Language has the power to make us understand others, to feel like others through time and space. To almost become someone else. Used as tool, computers can help us amplifying the use of language. But if we talk to them alone, they can extract understanding for commercial use and make us die a little.

Make Bots Identifiable

– Everybody that has an interest in influencing public opinion will happily pay a handful of Dollars to amplify their voices. Governments, political groups, corporations, traders, and just simple plain trolls will continue to shout through bot armies—as long as it is so cheap.

How does sending traffic to the App Store affect your App Store ranking?

– Sending too much traffic too the App Stores might negatively impact your App Store ranking.

Is Time Money?

– Bitcoin rose from 1,000 to 19,000 in a couple of months. Today it fell back to 10,000. If time is money, then what happened to people’s time? Is it lost?

Design is Political

– Everything around us is designed. Design shapes cities, gives form to houses, sketches and connects spaces; designers define our environment, our things, bodies and minds. Design is political.

Web Trend Map 2018

– The most important ingredient for a Web Trend Map is missing: The Web. Time to bring some of it back.

News from Facebook

– Step by step, Facebook has cut the news from its feeds. Yesterday, they confirmed that they will focus on content from friends and family while de-emphasizing news. How come? A brief history of the odd partnership between Facebook and the news industry and what it means for us.

Why we like distractions

– Just when it really matters and we should really do what we are about to do we are most vulnerable to distractions. How come? And what can we do about it?

Kickstarted: iA Writer for Windows

– iA Writer for Windows has been a long time coming. Ever since we first launched iA Writer for Mac you have asked, “Will you make a Windows version?” After over two Million downloads on iOS, Mac and Android, we’re excited to bring iA Writer to the world’s largest desktop platform. And to fulfill the vision we have for this app, we’ve just launched our first-ever Kickstarter campaign.

The Ideal Paragraph

– You may have read or heard that the ideal paragraph consists of one thought. Clearly, there are various ways to begin and end a thought. One way is to start with a claim or topic sentence, offer examples for your claim, explain how your examples support the claim, repeat the claim in the light of the examples, and build a bridge to the next thought. It is not clear if the ideal paragraph has five, six, seven, a maximum or a minimum number of sentences, as it is not clear what one thought is, where or how it begins, and where or how it ends. On second thought, one could as well argue that every sentence consists of one thought.

Who serves whom?

– Artificial Intelligence is a complex riddle for all sorts of experts. It’s full of magic, mystery, money, mind-boggling techno-ethical paradoxes and sci-fi dilemmas that may or may not affect us in some far or near future. Meanwhile, it already shapes our everyday life. Things already go wrong. And no one is responsible. What can we do?

“Art at scale”

– The excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails are a gold mine. The text itself is a raw cut-up from a series of private emails. Kay argues that fundamental innovation and following objectives run counter to each other. Very much like art, fundamental research needs to be free from objective purpose.