Writing Kit Blog

If you’ve been following my Twitter account, you must have heard about Writing Kit 2.0. This is a major release and will introduce many exciting features.

Let’s get the big news out of the way first: Writing Kit 2.0 is a universal app, and current users will get it for free. Buy it now if you haven’t done so.

Here’s how the iPhone version looks like:

While the interface is much smaller than its iPad counterpart, none of the features are left out. You’re free to write your document, do quick research, browse around to look for references, share your findings, etc. Writing Kit on iPhone is THE portable “mobile researching room”, just like the version you’ve been using on iPad so far.

You ask for more font choices, and there they are: American Typewriter, Baskerville, and Helvetica Neue. Want monospace ones? Anonymous Pro, Droid Sans Mono, and Inconsolata are yours to use.

Pinch-to-change-font-size sounds cool, but its implementation was awkward and clunky - I got it. In Writing Kit 2.0, you can now control the font size more precisely using the new Smaller/Bigger buttons.

Switching between the editor and the built-in browser will be much quicker. No more superfluous fading effect.

File management module has also gone through an overhaul. Use the popular, gimmicky Pull-to-refresh gesture to sync your files with Dropbox. Manually save your document at any time with the Save document option.

Did you also notice the new word count and character count? Yes, the most requested feature has been implemented.

One more thing

Writing Kit is famous for its integration with third-party apps and services. Writing Kit 2.0 continues this tradition with support for 3 highly-popular apps:

• Terminology: Tap on any word or phrase you write or come across in the built-in browser to look it up in Terminology. Use Substitute option to find an alternative and have it replaced automatically. You can even look up terms in the Quick Research dialog.

• Things and The Hit List support: You may be surprised to hear that Send to OmniFocus is one of the most frequently used sharing options in Writing Kit. Users love researching materials in the built-in browser and send their findings to their to-do app of choice. Not everyone is a die-hard OmniFocus fan, so I’m bringing Things and The Hit List task creation to this major release.

Excited yet? Get Writing Kit from the App Store today, and spread the words!