I know the space of writing tools is very crowded. But I must say that I did not know most of the more "popular" alternatives before mid-way in development, with which I'm trying to say we did not seek their inspiration directly.

We just got caught in this idea of an text editor we both would love to use, and given the restraints of our respective platforms (Aaron: Mac, Martin: Win7, Me: Ubuntu) we chose to make a web application. Although I love many aspects of open source software, I didn't find a tool such as Quabel for Ubuntu yet - thats why I was very eager to create this.

except for it's free and not Apple-only.