What’s next for austerityware
Writing apps in 2017 and beyond
NOVEMBER 19TH, 2016 — POST 313
The best writing apps get out of the way. After the launch of the App Store in 2008, a new class of apps took this principle to its logical conclusion in what became known as “distraction-free” writing. When he spoke to The Atlantic earlier this year, English professor and writer Matthew Kirschenbaum grouped this class of writing app under the moniker “austerityware”. We are all undoubtedly familiar with the big austerityware apps. The clean interfaces and simple typography of Ulysses and Byword make them perfect candidates to be featured on the iOS and Mac App Stores. In fact, as I look at the Mac App Store app, recent addition to the austerityware category Bear is in the Featured Apps banner. And this week, one of the pioneering pieces of austerityware iA Writer got a significant update. Simply keeping up with “distraction-free” software can be pretty distracting.
I know I get into these apps a little too deep. Whenever a new one floats onto Product Hunt or shows up in the App Store, I’m hungry to check it out, to check its distinct pallet of features. Because, as much as the initial goal of austerityware was just to be a pretty text box the blocked out the rest of the computer, in 2016 features like publishing support, cloud synchronisation, and word count features have become essential. When I looked into Bear after its launch earlier this year, I was a little miffed: it looked almost identical to my daily driver Ulysses. I feared maybe the category had peaked, that we’d done all that could and ought to be done. Because really, these apps can’t move much past the fact that they’re just there to push around plain text characters and understand Markdown. So it came as a surprise when this new version of iA Writer changed the game.
The standout addition to iA Writer 4 is what they’re calling “embedding”. Typing a / before a filename will include the contents of the embedded file in an output of the main file. It’s very neat, and so simply executed as to feel perfectly natural. It’s a feature that code editors and code languages have had for years. In CSS, for example, @import will pull in code from another source and can be useful to keep code manageable. This principle applied to longer-form writing — like books or screenplays — makes a lot of sense. Changes in the embedded file will carry across to the main file and it eliminates copy/paste or assembling work (a principle iA’s documentation likens to word processing visionary Ted Nelson’s concept of “transclusion”). And all this without breaking the ubiquitous compatibility of Markdown (though of course other apps won’t do any magic with embedded links).
iA shows that the path ahead for this nichey segment of apps lies in the very apps used to build them. Text editors in which code is written — from Sublime Text to Vim — have long proven they have a monopoly on the best means of handling plain text. The first step for austerityware was to shed the toolbars, the menus, the everything of apps like Microsoft Word, supported by John Gruber’s Markdown. They wanted to be approachable, professing a “just write” mentality, always including documentation on the specific markup for Markdown in a packaged text file. And Ulysses and Bear are both very elegant executions of this mentality. But text editors favoured by developers can do so much more: I’m thinking specifically here of folding — the temporary hiding of multiple lines into a single line — which I’ve only come across outside of a code context in Editorial for iOS.
Hopefully, austerityware is able to continue to push in this direction, though the limited syntax of Markdown might prove the limiting factor. And this has lead to a bunch of “forking” of the language, from GitHub Flavored Markdown to that which Pandoc is doing to Markdown with its own goals in mind. It’s commendable that iA was able to implement embedding without “forking” Markdown like this but my suspicion is other apps won’t feel as beholden to standardisation. But more than anything, the category hasn’t fallen stagnant as I had feared .
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