Writing Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Ulysses strives and seeks to be a better text editor for Mac

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Apr 8th, 2013)

Not long after I got my first personal Mac in 2004, I began looking for a robust writing program to replace Microsoft Word. There were a few good offerings that catered to what I wanted -- a word processor and a project manager. There was Circus Ponies' NoteBook, and I also used CopyWrite for a ...

NaNoWriMo tools for Apple devices ... and a few hot deals on writing tools

by Steven Sande (Oct 31st, 2012)

When it's time for Halloween, it's also time for another autumn tradition -- National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Over the years, a number of TUAW bloggers and readers have participated in the annual event, which runs exactly thirty days and is designed to give would-be ...

New iBooks Author supports LaTeX and MathML

by Mike Schramm (Oct 25th, 2012)

LaTeX is document markup system (similar to the popular Markdown) that's popular among high-level academia and mathematics authors. iBooks Author 2, which was released during Apple's big event, now supports the LaTeX protocol. It works through the MathML markup language, which a lot of ...

iBook Lessons: Creating Amazon KDP tables of contents on MS Word for Macintosh

by Erica Sadun (May 5th, 2012)

For whatever reason, many Amazon authors seem to be under the impression that you can only create a proper table of contents for Kindle Direct Publishing on Windows, not the Mac. Having just uploaded our newest book (Getting Ready for Mountain Lion) to Amazon, Steve Sande and I have invested a ...

Scrivener for iPad under development

by Kelly Hodgkins (May 4th, 2012)

Last December, Literature & Latte confirmed the company will begin porting its popular Mac writing app, Scrivener, to the iPad. Though work is under way, progress is slow because, as Literature & Latte points out, good apps take time to plan and develop. Much of the time since ...

Byword for iOS released

by Brett Terpstra (Mar 14th, 2012)

Those who know me know that Byword has become my favorite writing tool. I've been keeping my mouth shut about this release during the beta testing period, but I'm really excited to announce it's arrival: Byword for iOS. The iOS version includes the Markdown-editing features that I love on the Mac, ...

How to avoid sounding dumb when you write about Apple

by Chris Rawson (Feb 11th, 2012)

So, you want to write about Apple? Lots of people do these days. The company is a household name, its financial performance is virtually unparalleled, and it makes products that millions upon millions of users enjoy every single day. I can tell you from personal experience that getting paid to ...

Daily Mac App: WriteRoom

by Michael Rose (Nov 17th, 2011)

It seems every writer, coder or GTD aficionado has a favorite plain text editor on the Mac these days. For everyone who starts each day with a screenful of untitled TextEdit windows full of different short notes (that would describe my dear spouse, for the record) there's a TextMate guru, an ...

NaNoWriMo: Some helpful hints and tools

by Steven Sande (Oct 29th, 2011)

This morning, I noticed a tweet from @rvbelzen that said, "As a NaNoWriMo veteran, do you have any tips for this NaNoWriMo newbie, maybe an article you wrote about it?" Most of the posts that I've done about National Novel Writing Month for TUAW have focused on the tools, not on the technique. ...

Nisus updates Writer Pro for Lion

by Michael Grothaus (Sep 14th, 2011)

Nisus has updated its Nisus Writer Pro and Nisus Writer Express software with full OS X 10.7 Lion-compatibility and full-screen features. Besides the Lion features, Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.1 adds a number of requested features like drawing tools, track changes, and watermarks. Nisus Writer Express ...

Daily iPad App: Storyist for iPad

by Steven Sande (Aug 16th, 2011)

I know what you're probably thinking: "Steve's blogging about a writing tool and it's not even NaNoWriMo time yet!" As true as that may be, there's a version of the powerful Storyist writing app now available for iPad, and I just had to write about it whether or not November is near. Storyist ...

TUAW's Daily Mac App: Byword

by Samuel Gibbs (Jun 29th, 2011)

To a writer a decent text editor is worth its weight in gold. Unlike Word or Pages, Byword is a text editor that gives you just enough to get the job done, while getting out of your way. In its most basic form it's a plain text editor, but it can also produce and edit rich-text files and ...

Byword 1.2, now with Markdown support

by Brett Terpstra (May 23rd, 2011)

Byword is a full-screen, "distraction-free" word processor that has an interesting twist: it focuses on just the text around your cursor (or even just the current line), dimming the rest of your composition so that even that can't distract you. Byword (and its predecessors) are based on the idea ...

Visual Thesaurus is a great tool for writers

by Michael Grothaus (Apr 14th, 2011)

After I wrote a post about the changes in Lion's Dictionary app and made suggestions about how Apple could still improve it, I got a nice email from a reader asking if I would write an article about some other writing tools I use. One of my favorites is Visual Thesaurus by Thinkmap. Visual ...

TUAW Giveaway: Scrivener 2.0

by Michael Grothaus (Apr 7th, 2011)

For those of you who don't know, most of us at TUAW are big fans of Scrivener. If you're a writer -- whether it is a screenplay, novel or blog you're working on -- Scrivener should be your tool of choice. It lets you organize and format your writing projects with an ease that is ...