The Pleasure of the Text | Hacker News Reader

The Pleasure of the Text

informationarchitects.jp

24 pointssp4rki17 comments

This app really bothers me. Writer is sold to people "who can't concentrate while writing," and it seems iA believes the success of the app means the app really helps people focus.

But as anyone on OSX knows, people have a voracious appetite for these kinds of apps (WriteRoom, Ommwriter, ZenWriter). This doesn't mean these apps help anyone write. Rather, it says people who want to write spend a lot of time thinking about their tools. Instead of, you know, actually writing anything.

So there's a market of aspiring writers who obsess over text editors. iA releases Writer, and expands the "zen text editor" market to iPads. Now these aspiring writers can "focus only on their words" on the go! Only, they spend time complaining how, in landscape, you can only see 6 lines of text. Or how it's hard to move around your doc and regain context.

If you really enjoy writing, any other app would get the job done. Hell, pen and paper or a typewriter would get the job done. Instead, iA's tapped into this market of people who want to write but "can't focus." And I feel for them, because their writing tools aren't the problem.

Maybe you should actually try the app before you judge it. There are better and there are worse tools to work with, believe it or not.

Besides Burroughs there are literally hundreds of people that tried it and love it emphatically:

http://twitter.com/#!/iA/favorites

They're not all idiots.

I've seen your Twitter feed--it's full of accolades. Congrats on a great app release.

I'm not picking nits with Writer, though. My problem is with the family of "zen apps" that help writers "get in the zone," including yours.

If someone is frequently distracted when they write, they either (a) need to get away from the internet when writing, or (b) reevaluate whether they enjoy writing. It's like the programmer that can't decide between Emacs, Vim, TextEdit, or other IDEs. Stop making excuses, pick something, and work.

The fact that people will buy this app because it'll finally help them write without distraction just...bothers me. Maybe because I was there before. Anyway, don't take it personally--your app is selling like gangbusters, and it looks like a great user experience.

1. Those programs exist because there is a need to get out of the mess that Word is. 2. Programmers do have amazing apps, writers don't. 3. Fullscreen is not the solution to absence of distraction. I can work perfectly distraction free in Firework without going fullscreen. Cross editing is the main sickness of digital writing.

The key is a predefined writing-optimized typography that justifies the absence of formatting (a massive distraction) and a sub-mode that gets rid of all the visual clutter when necessary. Some think that Focus mode is just a gadget. It's not. The noise that is similar to the signal is the most distracting.

Great response. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

How'd you come to the conclusion about writing-optimized typography? Is this something you considered using your background in IA, or user/beta testing, or what?

Thanks. 1. I've been talking about reading typography for a long time and just got curious about what writing typography could be like. 2. Was always jealous of those amazing coding apps. 3. noticed that switching between writing in a small input field in the backend and reading in (a designed) preview mode on the frontend in WordPress improved my writing and just couldn't figure out why. 4. Secretly stalked people who wrote texts on computers at work, in cafés, and when visiting clients (online newspapers). Yeah and then (since I studied Philosophy) there was all this theoretical stuff (Barthes, see below) in the back of my head.

"this application turns this flat thing on the lap into the most efficient tool for writing that I know of."

Writing using your index finger on a touchscreen seems like a huge step back in terms of productivity and ergonomy to me.

You'd be surprised.

Sure, suprise me. I'd really like to see a video of someone typing for an hour or two on an iPad without needing a chiropractor afterwards and in the end producing more text than he'd produce on a laptop or netbook with a stock text editor. If you have trouble focusing, maybe it's because your body is in an awkward posture.

I don't own an iPad, but even thinking about the angle, that I'd have to look at it from while it rests on my lap, hurts my neck.

"I don't own an iPad" — but you know better than those who have used it for hours and hours (http://twitter.com/#!/iA/favorites)...

I don't own an iPad, but even thinking about the angle, that I'd have to look at it from while it rests on my lap, hurts my neck.

The iPad's form factor is exactly the same as reading a book or writing on a tablet of paper, two activities that have been going on for centuries. Not that reading and writing are the most ergonomically correct activities, either... but the notion that the iPad is contributing to a new form of neck pain is a bit ridiculous.

And then there is that black thing that puts it at an angle...

You can write on a tablet with one hand. You need two hands to type on the iPad, unless you're reclined in the "Steve Jobs-on-a-couch position" or hunched over a table.

The buzz around Writer comes from Focus Mode, not necessarily the WPM you churn out. Your WPM is lower because of iPad ergonomics, but it seems writers backtrack less with this app, so their realized WPM improves a ton. At least that's what iA says.

Is the title alluding to Barthes' book of the same name?

Yes. Barthes discerns between texte lisibles (readable) and texte scriptible (writable). Which was one of the inspirations to switch our focus from readablity to writability and create Writer. In Barthes' theory things are a little bit different, though ("readable" and "writable" indicate different kinds of written texts, not text in and post creation).

His distinction is maybe analogous to binary (readable) and source+makefile (writable).

Minor point: "text" here covers all sorts of artistic creations (TV, music, fine art), not just the written word.

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