iA - the fathers of @iawriter, are thrue minimalists designers
I’ve seen a new star - and it’s iA - or Information Architects. It’s not completely new star however, as I’ve used their Writer app since last year. Coincidentally, I’ve just read two brilliant blogposts related to iA’s founder Oliver Reichenstein:
- Good design is invisible: an Verge interview with iA’s Oliver Reichenstein, is a shocking eye-opening review, where the foundations of good design is explained.
- Mountain Lion’s New File System, is a blogpost on iA’s blog, also by Reichenstein. Just as I thought I’d given an ok explanation in my blog on why people should upgrade to Mountain Lion, I saw that I forgot the Document Library. And following Oliver on his file in one level folders story, I saw that I had omitted the most important part of the OS X update. Here it is:
You should absolutely read the two articles. They take you into the inner circle of Apple style design, and if you are open and concentrated, you will not be the same afterwards.
I’m writing this blogpost in iA Writer and doing it in focus mode. Glad to be back after a half year with Byword. Byword has a feature that I lacked sorely in iA, namely preview. By just pressing some buttons, I could get a HTML view of my post, and a possibility to copy it to my blog. Today I happened also to find the Marked app, which listen to a document, and does a HTML view of the markdown file automatically. With this third party included, I could return to the simplicity of iA again.
I will cite Oliver Reichenstein from the above blogpost:
The iCloud Document Library folders, restricted to one level, guide us to use a simple hierarchical system that mirrors our mental model.
