iA Writer has been delighting users with its minimal writing experience for nearly a decade, racking up more than 3 million downloads. The most recent version 5.5 release for Mac and iOS moves the bar higher for competing writing apps with new support for previewing PDFs and improved support for publishing to self-hosted WordPress sites.
In 2019, MacStories selected iA Writer as App of the Year, describing it as “a case study on how to build a desktop-class iOS/iPadOS app in 2019 that understands the traits of each platform while offering an opinionated, sophisticated design at the same time.” MacStories’ writeup details many reasons why the app continues to find success in 2020.
This week’s update introduces support for Micropub, which allows users to publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools. It also expands the availability of the the IndieAuth system for publishing to WordPress. Users are no longer limited to using Jetpack to authenticate their self-hosted sites.
iA Writer users can now use the more lightweight IndieAuth plugin to publish to their self-hosted sites. The plugin acts as an extension to OAuth, allowing the user’s website to be their own OAuth server. This option is helpful for iA Writer users who were reluctant to install Jetpack just to hook up their accounts for publishing.
Continued support for WordPress publishing comes as no surprise, not just because of its ubiquity on the web, but also because the iA company website and blog rely on WordPress.
iA Writer 5.5 also improves account management for connected services, allowing for the use and reordering of multiple accounts for WordPress, Medium, Ghost and Micropub. Check out the release post for a more detailed look at the Mac and iOS-specific updates in this release.
