Bicycle For Your Mind
Writed Pro falls short of the competition
Writed Pro
Product: Writed Pro
Price: $8.99
Writed Pro is one of a new class of applications which are appearing in the Mac App Store. It is at its base, a distraction free text editor, supporting Markdown. It lets you export to Markdown, Word (doc and docx files), OpenOffice (odt files) and Rich Text files (rtf files).
With the subscription model under which Word is now available from Microsoft, there seems to be a need for apps which have the ability to deal with Word files without actually using Word. Writed Pro is an attempt at doing that.
You can open any Word document. It gets converted to Markdown syntax. You can work on it, and export to a Word document.
I have no need for this feature. I am and have been Microsoft free for a decade. But I can see why this has become a feature which is highlighted by these applications. Being able to read and generate Microsoft Word files is an important skill to have in the business world.
I have no idea how well Writed Pro does in converting the word files to markdown. I threw a few Word files at it, but they were not rich in formatting, it seemed to handle those fine. I don't know what it would do with a complicated, densely styled Word document. Pages can read and export to Word files too. I prefer Writed Pro only because it converts Word files to Markdown and that is the format I live and write in.
It is a competent Markdown based text editor. Supports most of the usual Markdown features. Footnotes are not supported and tables support needs work. There is a rudimentary support of keyboard commands built into the program. For instance, ⌘+B for bold, ⌘+I for italic and ⌘+K for strikethrough. However there are no keyboard commands for some other things you do regularly in Markdown, for instance links, ordered and unordered lists. It doesn't support system level keyboard commands for some commonly used features like full screen mode. The default command is ⌃+⌘+F, but Writed Pro doesn't support it. You have to invoke the command through the Window menu.
The full screen is well implemented. The focus mode lacks typewriter scrolling, and true focus on paragraph or sentence as implemented by Byword andiA Writer. Both of these applications let you open Microsoft Word files, and export documents to the Microsoft word format. iA Writer like Writed pro also converts Word files to Markdown. Writed Pro is playing in a crowded field with some well established competitors.
The Competition Eats Writed Pro's Lunch
In every meaningful criteria, Writed Pro seems to be the poor cousin of iA Writer. That might be understandable, Writed Pro is at version 1.0. iA Writer has had a few iterations and is now at version 3.0. These are the things Writed Pro does better:
- Writed Pro has themes. iA Writer only has light and dark mode.
- Writed Pro supports a few different fonts which are tied to its themes. iA Writer only supports its customized implementation of Nitti.
iA Writer is a complete markdown based writing solution, Writed Pro has a ways to go. You can read about iA Writer here.
Recommendation
If you are interested in this product category. Get iA Writer. Writed Pro only makes sense if you are severely resource constrained. iA Writer costs $14.99 while Writed Pro costs $8.99, but is often on sale for $0.99.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie