Writing Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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 ...

Want to write on your iPad? Here's some tips to get started

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Dec 27th, 2010)

So, you received an iPad under the tree. As you're playing with it, you're wondering what you can do with it in regards to creating the written word. For the writer -- from fiction author to enterprising blogger -- the iPad is also a very portable way to get some serious writing done, even though it ...

Scrivener 2.0 public preview now available

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Oct 25th, 2010)

Barely a week before NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) begins, the public preview of Scrivener 2.0 is out. This version is sans the project templates that will be available when the full version hits next week. In addition to the 2.0 preview, a beta version of the new Windows client is also ...

A quick roundup of iOS text editors with Dropbox support

by Steven Sande (Sep 29th, 2010)

This morning we received word from Jesse Grosjean at Hog Bay Software that his new app, PlainText (free, in-app purchase to remove ads), is now available on the App Store. It's one of several iOS text editors that feature support for Dropbox, so we thought a quick roundup of these apps was in ...

Google Docs editing coming to iPad

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Sep 20th, 2010)

This is pretty fantastic. Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, announced via the Google official blog today that mobile editing for Google Docs is coming to the iPad and Android. Up until now, the Webkit browsers used on the mobile devices have been missing a key capability for handling ...

Developer offers enticing look at Scrivener 2.0

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Sep 15th, 2010)

Developer KB made a series of blog posts about what will and will not be featured in the upcoming Scrivener 2.0. What I like is that he's not so focused on introducing new features, but improving on what's already there. The initial release came out back in 2007, but this is a case where slow and ...

myTexts for iPad, distraction-free writing to go

by Brett Terpstra (May 29th, 2010)

A while back, I shared my discovery of myTexts, a robust distraction-free writing application ... well, as robust as a stripped-down, no-frills editor would want to be. Now, myTexts has shown up on the iPad, with iTunes syncing of your text files between your iPad and the desktop version. To make ...

Calling all authors: How to sell your books in the iBook store

by David Winograd (May 27th, 2010)

Have you got a novel or two in your bottom desk drawer? Did you participate in the National Novel Writing Month competition last November? Are you a budding author who needs that last nudge to actually get writing? If any of these describe you, Apple has just given you a way to get your masterpiece ...