Sep 14, 2011 Download Penzu Free Diary & Private Journal and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. *Used by over 1 million people around the world *Best free journal in any app store *Syncs to the web and other mobile platforms for free Penzu is the most popular free diary, journal and notepad. App developer Ginger Labs recently launched a companion app for the Mac ($10; OS X 10.9 or later), where you can sync your notes via iCloud across devices. If you're not a Mac user, you can still.
Dedicated Writing Apps
If you have a habit of writing diary and you want to upgrade your daily dairy experience with this digital world, Journaley can help you.You can call Journaley as a free diary app or a note-taking.
Write beautifully on iPhone, iPad, and Mac Bear is a beautiful, flexible writing app for crafting notes and prose. Mac App Store Subscribe. Get updates on Bear progress. No spam, ever. Many of Bear’s features are free to use on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. You can create notes, add tags and attachments, and export to a variety of formats.
What constitutes the best app for writers depends on their process, genre, and conditions in which they are most productive. Additionally, it depends on what they intend to do with the finished work: publish it online, send it to an agent, or shoot a film. There is no single best app for all writers, but there are plenty of excellent writing apps that cater to different needs, work styles, and genres.
Priced for the Starving Artist (Mostly)
Apps for writers tend to be less expensive than other kinds of software. Many sell for a one-time fee, although a few require a subscription. The least expensive writing apps cost only around $10. Final Draft, one of the most expensive writing apps, costs $249.99, but even that is a one-time fee, meaning you pay once and own the software for life. Ulysses used to sell for a standalone fee but recently moved to a subscription model, now costing $39.99 per year. If you own an older copy of Ulysses, it's still yours to keep and use, but you won't receive any updates.
When an idea strikes, many writers want to be able to jot it down or immediately add it to an ongoing project. To do that, they likely need a companion mobile app to go along with their desktop software. Support for mobile apps isn't particularly strong in the writing category. A few companies that make software for writers offer iOS apps, but it's rare to find anything for Android. Additionally, mobile writing apps typically cost a good deal more than what people are used to paying for an app. Scrivener for iPhone and iPad, for example, runs $19.99. Storyist's iOS app is $14.99. To get over this price hurdle, I recommend thinking about the combined cost of the mobile and desktop software together and considering it a bundled purchase.
What's the Best Screenwriting Software?
As a genre, screenwriting has unique requirements. Scripts for movies, television, and the stage must make clear the difference between direction, setting descriptions, spoken dialogue, and so forth. This allows all the people involved in creating the final product—actors, film crew, editors, and directors—to do their jobs. As a result, the formatting for screenwriting is exceedingly precise. A few writing apps cater specifically to professional screenwriters. Final Draft is one, and it continues to be an industry standard. If you're actively employed in film or television, you might already own a copy. When you purchase Final Draft, you can use the app on two computers, and it's compatible with both Windows and macOS.
Another app that specifically handles scripts is Adobe Story. The app costs $9.99 per month, but it's also available to anyone who has an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Story is unusual because it's not just writing software. It also lets you make notes about the actual production of a script. For example, you can write a detailed description of shots you want to see or provide information about shooting locations. The app can generate a production schedule based on all the metadata associated with each scene. Adobe Story is also compatible with Adobe Premiere, so after the footage has been shot, you can pipe in the script to run alongside the video, helping the editors do their job, too.
Alternatives to Microsoft Word
Why would a writer use a dedicated writing app instead of Microsoft Word (or Google Docs, Apple Pages, or any other typical word processor)? There's no reason you can't use any of those apps, but they don't have many of the special features you get from apps that are specific to writers.
Fiction writers, book authors, and screenplay writers often change the order or scenes, sections, and chapters. That's easy to do when an app is designed specifically with professional long-form writers in mind. With the right drag-and-drop tools, you can quickly and easily reorganize your files. It also helps if footnotes and endnotes renumber accordingly, when you move parts around.
Another feature that office apps typically don't have is a writing target. It's common for professional writers to strive to meet a daily word or page count goal. So while Word, Google Docs, and Pages all have word count features, they don't have the same options for setting and tracking goals over time.
Some writers need to keep exhaustive notes regarding plot points and characters, and possibly even visual references, such as an image of a shoot location or faces that inspire characters. The best writers' apps include tools that make it easy to see reference material and notes whenever the writer needs, and then get back to writing quickly.
Finally, the word processors in suites are generally heavy-duty apps that can do everything from formatting and footnoting to headers, footers, and special pagination. That's handy for many kinds of business and academic writing, but for the average creative writer, all this may just be a major distraction.
What's the Best Distraction-Free Writing App?
Writers who find themselves in the less-is-more camp will want a writing app that strips away anything that could possibly be the least little bit distracting. Distraction-free writing apps are a dime a dozen; the trick is to find one that also offers the tools you need when you need them. The best distraction-free writing apps hide the tools you need until the appropriate time, rather than omitting them altogether.
With that criterion in mind, Ulysses is my favorite distraction-free writing app, and a PCMag Editors' Choice. A well-designed interface makes Ulysses easy to use and easy on the eyes. It has good tutorials and help menus for newcomers, including a cheat sheet for Markdown language. Markdown is a very lightweight set of codes that can be used instead of the rich formatting options that are common in word processors. If you've ever typed asterisks (*) around a word in a chat app to make it bold, that's similar to Markdown. It's very simple, and takes no time at all to learn, especially when you have a cheat sheet to guide you.
The idea behind Markdown is that you can apply basic formatting, like marking titles and subtitles, bold and italic text, without moving your fingers from the keyboard. It's also less distracting than having a panel with 50 alluring typefaces that you're dying to try. Ulysses is only available for Mac and iOS. Windows users might also try yWriter.
Note that we have reviewed Focused (for Mac), but it didn't score well enough to make this top-ten list. If you're curious why, please feel free to read the review.
Mac apps can help you to become more productive. Some of the best productivity apps enable you to get more done. But you have to know what apps are the right fit for your needs and how to use them. In this tutorial, we cover the best Mac productivity apps and explain how each one can help you become more productive. Look no further than our list of the best Mac apps available around the internet, from excellent productivity tools to social media apps, entertainment, and security software! Whatever you need. Mac app for organization.
What Are the Best Writing Apps for Novelists?
Book authors spend a lot of their time simply organizing their manuscript. Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, the work doesn't always shape up as the author originally intended. Chapters sometimes move. Stories aren't always told in a linear fashion. And scenes sometimes become more effective when their order changes.
To facilitate the shaping of a story in this way, you need a library, or a pane within the writing app showing file folders and their organization. Not all writing apps have one, as you can see from the chart above.
Writing for Medium, WordPress Blogs, and More
Book authors and screenwriters aren't the only types of writers, of course. Many writers create shorter pieces that they publish online directly, without ever passing through the hands of an agent, publisher, or movie producer. If you're publishing on Medium or WordPress, it sure is handy to have a writing app that can export each piece directly to your platform of choice.
Ulysses and iA Writer both have integration options for those two platforms. Like Ulysses, iA Writer is a distraction-free writing app, but it's much more pared down. It has some neat functions, such as text transclusion, that can be fun to learn for people who think more like programmers than traditional writers. Text transclusion allows you to create a final document of many smaller pieces by, essentially, giving commands about which files to pull together and in what order. 'First display the introduction. Next add an image. Then include my argument. Finally, show my author bio.' The text of your document could be all of four sentences long, but it might whip together a piece that, when exported, is 25 pages.
Your Writing, Your Choice
Every writer has unique needs and desires. Do you need an app that works on both Windows and macOS? Is learning a new way to format text a deal-breaker? Does your final submission need to meet industry standards the way screenplays and teleplays do? The range of software dedicated to writers is impressive. If nothing tickles your fancy from the full reviews linked below, you should also read our short synopses of many other apps for writers, as well. Finally, if you decide that a dedicated writing tool just isn't for you, and you'd rather just use a plain old word processor, we've rounded up the top office suites, too.
Featured Writing App Reviews:
Final Draft Review
MSRP: $249.00
Pros: Well tailored for screenwriters. Powerful tools for both writing scenes and crafting the larger story. Plenty of view options. Offers a variety of templates. Collaboration supported.
Cons: Collaborative editing restricted to one person at a time. Inadequate default auto-save and revision history.
Bottom Line: Final Draft is the software you need if you are in the screenwriting business or aspire to be. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, both from a story perspective and a technical one.
Read Review
Scrivener Review
MSRP: $45.00
Pros: Excellent tools for organizing writing. Ample collection of templates. Competitive price. Multiple installs allowed. Also available for Windows and iOS.
Cons: No web app. No native collaboration features.
Bottom Line: Built with writers in mind, Scrivener 3 has everything you need to research, compose, organize, edit, and finish a piece of writing, all for a ridiculously reasonable price.
Read Review
Ulysses (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $39.99
Pros: Beautiful and clean interface. Excellent selection of distraction-free modes. Flexible. Tracks writing goals. Filters help organize content. Can publish directly to WordPress.
Cons: Now sold as subscription. Requires some learning, especially for those unfamiliar with Markdown. No audio file uploads.
Bottom Line: Ulysses is the most elegant distraction-free writing app for Mac. It's ideal for writers who prefer a minimal interface and total flexibility, rather than a lot of structure and hand-holding.
Read Review
Adobe Story CC Review
MSRP: $9.99
Pros: Screenwriting and preproduction in one app. Generates shooting schedules. Feature rich. Collaboration features.
Cons: No mobile apps or desktop apps; online only. Monthly subscription makes it expensive over the long run.
Bottom Line: Screenwriters who not only write but also direct and produce their own work won't find a better outlet for their creativity than Adobe Story.
Read Review
Script Studio (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $199.95
Pros: Excellent feature set. Helpful sample scripts included. Attractive and organized interface. Also available for Windows.
Cons: Expensive. No mobile apps. Some crashes in testing.
Bottom Line: With a professional interface and wealth of tools, Script Studio is among the best writing apps you'll find. Its high price may dissuade some from trying it, though.
Read Review
Storyist (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $59.99
Pros: Very good templates for scripts. Clean, clear interface. Includes tools for storyboarding, outlining, character sheets. Supports importing and exporting many formats.
Cons: No collaboration features. Mediocre auto-save functionality.
Bottom Line: Storyist packs the power of a full word processor into an app for writers. If you don't get distracted by having too many features, it's an excellent Mac app.
Read Review
iA Writer (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $19.99
Pros: Inexpensive. Uses distraction-free style with Markdown language. Offers transclusion method for embedding images, tables, and so on. Can export directly to Medium and WordPress.
Cons: Few tools for organizing and arranging files. No templates for genres. Not ideal for code-phobic writers.
Bottom Line: Taking minimalism to the extreme, iA Writer might be the writing app with the fewest built-in distractions, and it's inexpensive, too. But this Mac app is also BYOE: bring your own everything.
Read Review
yWriter Review
MSRP: $0.00
Pros: Good structure. Rich tools for story and character development. Plentiful stats. Free.
Cons: No Mac app or mobile apps. Doesn't include screenwriting tools or templates. Support for third-party backup options could be more apparent.
Bottom Line: The free writing app yWriter has a stats-heavy, technical feel to it, which is great for writers who crave organization and data about their work.
Read Review
Byword (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $11.99
Pros: Distraction-free writing app with support for Markdown language.Supports direct publishing to popular online sites. Good export options. Inexpensive.
Cons: No library or tools for reference materials. Not ideal for long-form writers. Lacks templates. Solutions to common technical problems require macOS Terminal.
Bottom Line: Byword, an inexpensive writing app for Mac and iOS, publishes your work directly to Medium, WordPress, and other platforms. It's not ideal for long-form writers, however.
Read Review
WriteRoom (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $9.99
Pros: Distraction-free, lightweight Mac app for writing. Inexpensive. Some neat view options.
Cons: Does not support Markdown formatting. No mobile apps. Lacks a library view/folder structure. No preview before PDF export. No collaboration features.
Bottom Line: WriteRoom is an inexpensive Mac writing app with a less-is-more approach that helps you focus on your words. It's too bare-bones for book projects or screenplays, but, for shorter works, it can get the job done.
Read Review
For a long time, Android and PC users have had to look on jealously while Mac and iOS users get beautiful journaling apps like Day One. Journey, a new app for Android and Chrome, ends the forlorn looks.
A Brief Introduction To Journaling
Journals are basically digital diaries. It’s a healthy habit you can adopt in 30 daysStart A Digital Journaling Habit With A 30-Day ChallengeStart A Digital Journaling Habit With A 30-Day ChallengeOne useful path to personal self-improvement is through keeping a journal. But this approach requires journal writing to become a habit. A journaling challenge could be the push you need to just begin.Read More, and it will serve you well for the rest of your life. Journaling has been shown to have several benefits, including helping you track your moods and to finally stop procrastinatingHow To Stop Procrastinating: The Only New Year Resolution You Should SetHow To Stop Procrastinating: The Only New Year Resolution You Should SetKick the habit of procrastination and start taking action without waiting for the right time. Stopping procrastination is the only new year resolution you need. Here's why.Read More.
Our own Bakari Chavanu has written extensively about the practice and regularly hosts Twitter chats around the topic. In fact, if you are new to this, his beginner’s guide to digital journalingThe Beginner's Guide to Digital Journaling The Beginner's Guide to Digital Journaling Maintaining a private journal is a great way to build your writing skills, spill out your thoughts, desires, worries, and reflections on paper. The very act of writing itself can often help you think through..Read More is the best place to start.
Diary Writing App For Mac Free Free
Bakari is a fan of Day One to power up your journal writingPower Up Your Journal Writing With These Day One TipsPower Up Your Journal Writing With These Day One TipsJournal or diary writing is a great way to exercise and improve your writing skills, document what is going on in your life, and to stay in tune with your thoughts and feelings.Read More, and rightly so. That is arguably the finest journaling app around and definitely the most beautiful. When it comes to maintaining a digital diary, design matters; good design keeps making you want to go back to an app. Android has been particularly unlucky not to have a beautiful journal app, although the basic functionality can be emulated by writing a digital diary in DiaroKeep A Beautiful, Orderly, and Private Journal Of Your Thoughts and Days With Diaro For AndroidKeep A Beautiful, Orderly, and Private Journal Of Your Thoughts and Days With Diaro For AndroidKeeping a personal journal can often help us make sense of the difficult times in our lives, or better remember the good times. If you're carrying around a smartphone, you already have a powerful and..Read More and others.
Meet Journey
Journey is an exciting addition to the Google Play Store. Here’s what you need to know about it:
Free Writing App For Mac
Price: It’s free for the things you really need, including importing an existing journal. The $5.99 premium package gives you markdown support, removes PDF watermark, lets you export and backup the journal, and has Night Mode.
Cross-platform: It’s available as a Chrome app, so you can use it on Windows, Mac, Linux or Chromebook.
Design: It’s gorgeous. No really, just try it out. The flat design, the well-spaced breathing room, the beautiful fonts (you can choose between five), the easy-to-use UI—and most of it is customisable. It’s flawless.
Reminders: In the Android app, you can set a daily reminder (or choose the days of the week) to update your journal at a selected time.
Security: You can password-protect your journal with a PIN, so no one else can “accidentally” look at your private thoughts.
Calendar: The calendar view is a nice way to see which days you have updated your journal on, and get a quick preview.
Tags: You can browse your journal by tags, which is also a neat way to see a chronological list of entries.
Photos: You can add one photo to any entry, but only one. This is unnecessarily limiting, hopefully it will be lifted.
Inspiration: Journey gives you a new inspiring thought every day, to make your writing and your life a little easier. You could also try some of thse websites for unique journal writing ideas5 Useful Sites For Journal Writing Ideas And Techniques5 Useful Sites For Journal Writing Ideas And TechniquesJournal writing has a strong tradition of not only helping writers improve their writing skills, but the process of writing your thoughts, worries, and challenges can also be useful. if you're stuck for ideas or..Read More.
Atlas: All your notes can be geo-tagged to view a map of where you have been and what you have written there. Quite cool.
Weather: Journey will automatically record the weather each day as well.
Offline: You can use both the Chrome and the Android apps offline. Journey will sync the data to its servers when you next go online.
What Is Journey Missing?
Best Free Writing App For Mac
For all the goods it brings to the table, Journey still has a few things missing. The Chrome app still doesn’t have reminders, which is a big miss. Not even a daily email reminder, like what some services offer.
Diary Writing App For Mac Free Online
Journey also does not support video and audio, and allows only one photo per entry.
Should You Get Journey?
Despite the few flaws, Journey is by far the best journaling app I have used on Android or Chrome. It’s actually an app that can make you keep writing journal entries for a whole yearHow To Keep Writing Daily Journal Or Diary Entries For A YearHow To Keep Writing Daily Journal Or Diary Entries For A YearThe start of a new year is a great time to begin keeping a journal or diary, but the challenge lies in keeping up your new daily journal writing habit.Read More. If you use Google Chrome or Android, and especially if you use both, it’s worth going on a journey with Journey:
Diary Writing App For Mac Free Download
Download: Journey for Chrome (Free) [No Longer Available]
Book Writing App For Mac Free
Download:Journey for Android (Free)
Your Thoughts About App Design
How much does design affect your decision in using an app? Would you be willing to give up a few non-essential features for great design, or do you want functionality over form at all costs?