: What makes good writing software? I'm developing a writing app and I'm interested to know what features would be most appreciated for such a thing. I am most interested in writing versus editing,

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Take a good long look at Scrivener. Note that the link has a Scrivener for Dummies title as the first thing you see. That is either insulting or an admission of failure.

Scrivener is software makes it easy to write and organize a book. But there are certain things about it that are maddening, because they look trivial and simple but are actually unintuitive to the point of utter opacity (see Scrivener for Dummies reference above). It's fine to be able to organize a book into subsections, but exporting those in a way that makes visual sense in the compiled novel is a task I had to Google to figure out—and even then I had to experiment with checking and unchecking level-inclusions and the like, over and over. Then when I switched from the Mac to the PC and tried to use the new computer (which runs the Windows port of the originally Mac-only software an order of magnitude faster than my Mac), it lost all that section information. How? Why? Help!

If you can see how easy they make the writing and how awkward they make everything else, and can put that difference into a UI that fixes the problems, you will have a killer product.

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As silly as this may sound: the ability to turn every single function OFF if desired.

Bells and whistles are great. Some people love them. I hate a lot of them, although not always.

Sometimes I want my word processor to catch my CApitalization typos and repeated words. Sometimes I don't. I don't want it looking over my shoulder so it can complain if I use passive voice. I don't want it to automatically superscript "th" in 20th. Sometimes I don't want it to turn every bulleted sentence into an indented list, but sometimes that's exactly what I want.

So I want the ability to turn all those tools on and off, easily. Whatever whizbang features you end up adding to your app, I want a toggle for them so I can choose to use them or not.

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