I like IAWriter on the iPad. I've actually used it to write several full-length articles on my iPad while on the move. I wrote "The problem with blogging" on IA Witer, for example.

I'm not entirely sure what niche it fills on the Mac, though. I have already shelled out for WriteRoom there, and that pretty much does everything I need it to.

On the other hand, it'd be nice if the MarkDown formatting worked on the iPad version.

Still, good work, keep it up!

I had the pleasure of beta testing the app for a while before it was launched and thought the price cheap. It's really interesting to see how many people have come up with issues with either pricing or the features without trying the app first.

But even more interesting are the "reviews" that came out immediately after the app was launched. Reviews by people who obviously had not tested or even purchased the app. They judged it based on screen shots and their own assumptions. Gizmodo being the prime example here.

Given the pricing expectations of the Mac App Store, people's tendency to pay based on how easy they think it was to build the app (something this minimalistic practically codes itself) and the mentality that if I don't find something useful, nobody else must either, I really feel bad for people who are new to the app business.

It's interesting that they sell the lack of features as a feature in itself. I remain skeptical of their tagline about better tools and better craftmen, at least as it concerns their product being the better tool.

I'm an avid Emacs user, so I guess I'll never understand this trend towards minimalist editors. If you want to go full-screen, you can do that in emacs (you can even get the same kind of layout and look and feel with something like darkroom mode), and most decent editors anyway. Is having features in the editor really so distracting?