The Mac is a great tool for writers, with a plethora of software available for any kind of writing. It doesn't matter if you're a student spending long nights on your big paper, a journalist writing up your latest scoop, or a novelist furiously typing away on your next opus — there's an app for you on the Mac.
Aug 23, 2008 Reply to: MAC software for Writing Papers PLEASE NOTE: Do not post advertisements, offensive materials, profanity, or personal attacks. Please remember to be considerate of other members. These cool free apps will assist in turning your writing into an efficient process. Use them as much as you want because they won’t hurt your budget! But if academic writing is too overwhelming for you, use additional academic help from the experts. Even if you have urgent task and tough deadline, they can deliver useful samples for you.
Ulysses
Ulysses offers a full array of tools for writers of any kind. This app is easy to pick up and start using but offers a wide array of customization options for everything from writing to exporting. Choose to work in Markdown or create your own markup style. With Ulysses, you can also create your own writing environment with everything from background colors to fonts. When it comes time to publish, you can export your work in a variety of formats, including plain text, DOCX, and ePub. You can also publish your work to WordPress sites and Medium.
Your projects all sync with iCloud between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with Dropbox support also available. The app also recently added support for Touch ID to keep your documents safe.
- $44.99 - Download Now
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- iPhone and iPad, $24.99 - Download Now
Byword
'Simple but effective' is the best way to describe Byword. With this Markdown-focused writing app, you start with a blank document and just write. It's a minimalist app with only a few settings to fuss with, and Byword really only cares about getting you writing. Your documents sync between Mac, iPhone, and iPad using iCloud Drive, though you can also store them in Dropbox.
When it comes to publishing, you've got options for PDF and HTML. You can also post what you've written to blogging services such as Medium, WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger, or you could send your document to Evernote.
- $11.99 - Download Now
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- iPhone and iPad, $5.99 - Download Now
iA Writer
iA Writer's gone through quite a few changes over the years. Where the previous Pro app tried to break down your writing into a flow between notes and writing and editing, the modern iA Writer focuses on having your write in plain text, with full Markdown support. That's not to say that there aren't advanced features, however, as there are quite a few. Syntax Control breaks down your writing to show you the structure, highlighting adjectives, nouns, conjunctions, and more. Link to other documents in iA Writer to combine them into a single project, or link to images or spreadsheet files to see them in iA Writer's Preview screen in a number of different templates.
Like other apps on this list, iA Writer lets you publish to blogs, in this case, WordPress and Medium. You can also export your work in Markdown, PDF, HTML, and Microsoft Word.
- $9.99 - Download Now
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- iPhone and iPad, $3.99 - Download Now
Scrivener
Scrivener is nothing short of a full-featured suite of tools for writers. Novels, scripts, essays, research papers, it doesn't matter, because Scrivener supports all of them. Organize your ideas on digital notecards and lay them out on the corkboard to see how your work fits together. Import images, PDF and other media you've used as research to refer to it later. Keep your work segmented for easier organization and edition, while maintaining its structure with the Binder. And each part of the app can be customized to create the exact writing environment that you need. It's actually hard to encapsulate just how many options Scrivener gives you.
When you're done, compile your project into a single document, and export in formats like DOC, rich text, PDF, ePub, Kindle, and even export for other apps like Final Draft. Away from your Mac? You can also check out Scrivener for iPhone and iPad, which lets you work on your Scrivener projects no matter where you are.
- $44.99 - Download Now
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- iPhone and iPad, $19.99 - Download Now
Blogo
Blogo is a standout amongst our selections here because while many of these apps allow you to publish to the web, that's Blogo's explicit purpose. Open up Blogo and sign in to your WordPress, Blogger, or Medium account and start writing those hot takes. Manage everything from your post's title to its tags, preview your posts, and images. Write in Markdown or rich text, insert inline HTML and code blocks, and keep track of your writing goals. You can also perform some basic photo editing, cropping and resizing photos, and even adding effects and filters.
While Blogo is free up front, you can subscribe to Blogo Pro for $2.99 per month (or $24.99 for a year) to get access to more advanced features. You'll be able to add as many accounts as you want, get access to the Media Search feature to easily find videos, images, GIFs, and more, and on certain accounts, you can even moderate and reply to comments.
- Free - Download Now
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- iPhone and iPad, Free - Download Now
Bear
A relatively new app compared to the rest of the list, Bear might seem simple, but it offers a great deal of flexibility for handling text. It's true that Bear is good for both notes and todo checklists, but it's support for Markdown, a variety of themes, and simple organization makes it a great tool for many different kinds of writing. Add images, files, code blocks, and more to spice up your work and give it more context.
In terms of options, you've got few. Choose how to sort your documents, pick a theme, pick your font, and even control fine-grain details such as font size, line height and width, and paragraph spacing. Subscribe to Bear Pro for $1.49 per month in order to sync your documents between Bear for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
- Free - Download Now
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- iPhone and iPad, Free - Download Now
Pages
Apple's own writing app, Pages lets you create all sorts of documents. There are more than 60 templates in Pages, covering just about every kind of writing, from short essays to research papers. There are even templates for items like business cards and flyers. You can add images and shapes, layout your documents in different styles, and more. You can also secure documents with Touch ID if you have one of Apple's 2016 MacBook Pros with Touch Bar.
Pages also makes it easy to collaborate with other people. Multiple people, whether they're on macOS, iOS, or even Windows thanks to iCloud.com, can collaborate on a document at the same time. You can share collaborative documents publicly or with specific users, see who is in the document at any given time, and follow their cursors as they edit the project.
- Free ($19.99 for pre-October 2014 Macs) - Download Now
See also:
- iPhone and iPad, Free ($9.99 for pre-September 2014 iOS devices) - Download Now
Your favorites?
What is your writing app of choice on your Mac? Do you use one of these or something else? Let us know in the comments.
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For the past few months I have been researching some research apps…
On our sister site, The Focus Course, I recently wrote an article detailing my process for how I build my own, alternate index of notes and ideas when reading a book.
You can get much more detail in the link above, but in a nut, an alternate index is no more than something you list out in the back of the book you’re reading that you create and update as you read through the book. It’s a list you create in real time that is comprised of the book’s themes and topics that most resonate with you, as well as the pages that have the best quotes and ideas around those topics.
Within that article, I dropped in a brief aside about my desire to begin organizing the notes, highlights, and takeaways from the books I read into a digital database of sorts. As such, I’ve been looking at different research apps to find just the right one.
I’ve been writing for a living since 2011, and despite my greatest fears, I’ve never had a shortage of ideas. For nearly a decade all of my ideas and notes have been kept in Simplenote, but for the past year or so I’ve been wanting a system that is just a little bit more complex than what I’m currently using.
In short, what I’m looking for is something to store all of the ideas, bits of inspiration, notes, quotes, takeaways from the books I read, and more. (Something akin to Ryan Holliday’s notecard system — but digital.)
Since I’m already creating an alternate index of ideas in the back of each book I read, what I’d like to do is create a digital and universally-searchable version of that index: a single repository to organize, sort, and search all my highlights and notes.
As you can imagine, there are a LOT of notes and research apps out there that do this. The issue wasn’t finding an app that was capable — it was finding an app that works for me and my workflows.
I want to do more than simply jot down my ideas and notes. I also want to have them compiled and structured (rather than a giant list sorted only by modification date), but not wholly cut off from one another.
And I also want some pretty fancy search capabilities. For instance, I’d love the ability to bring up all the highlights related to “focus” from all books I’ve read. Or, perhaps, to view my notes and highlights related to “time management,” but only from those books that are about entrepreneurship, and then compare those same notes and highlights against books that are only about creativity.
That said, here are a few of my initial thoughts on some of the different notes and research apps out there today.
Simplenote: This is the app I’ve been using for idea capture and other miscellaneous note taking since it shipped nearly a decade ago. I love how easy it is to use, how — ahem — simple it is, and how reliable the sync is. But for my current use-case, I’m looking for something that can handle images and has a more robust folder structure beyond just tags.
Bear: If you haven’t tried out Bear, you really should (Mac / iOS). It’s spectacular (and may even replace Simplenote for me). You can insert photos into notes in Bear, but otherwise it’s still pretty simple. That’s not a knock against the app — it is simple by design. But that means that, for my needs in this case, it’s too simple to be my go-to research app.
Day One: This app is one of my all-time favorites, but, as with the aforementioned apps, Day One is not built for what I need in this scenario.
Apple’s Notes App: There is a lot to love about the Notes app (and even more once iOS 11 ships). You can drop all sorts of cool things into a note, and even draw and sketch, and more. But the search and sort functionality within Notes is not quite what I’m looking for.
Evernote: I love the power of Evernote and its strong emphasis on making idea capture as easy as possible, but I don’t love the way it ruins the formatting of my text and the way all my content is a silo inside the app. There are many, many smart folks who use Evernote, but so far, for me, it still just doesn’t feel right.
Together: An alternative to Evernote, Together is a pretty classy app. But, at least so far in my experience, the process of getting information into the app is far too tedious, as is the process for properly tagging that information. I may just need to spend more time learning the app, but if something isn’t easy to use then I know from experience that I won’t use it.
Other Apps: There is also Microsoft OneNote, Scrivener, plain text files with nvALT, DEVONthink, Papers, and probably a few others. Some of these simply don’t appeal to me, and some of them I haven’t yet tried out.
Ulysses (My Pick)
I’ve been using Ulysses for quite a long time, but only as a writing app — not for collecting notes and other tidbits related to research.
Ulysses is a fantastic app, and it does a great job at simplifying it’s vast complexity. However, I didn’t initially consider it for my researching needs because I didn’t think it had a robust search engine. But, turns out, I was wrong.
Paper App
Thanks to a new project we’re working on here at The Sweet Setup, I just discovered the Smart Filters in Ulysses, and whoa. These filters are basically smart folders. You can create all sorts of variables for how you want sheets to be filtered, and you can even move the filters around within different groups so as to bring up different results based on the group.
For example, here’s a filter I set up to search within all my book quotes for any notes that contain the keywords “business” and “creativity.”
And here’s a filter I set up that shows me any and all notes I’ve created or worked on within the past 48 hours.
Best Writing Software For Mac
Input and Organization Within Research Apps
Mac Apps For Writing Research Papers Examples
The two things that matter most to in my use of notes and research apps are: (1) ease of input and (2) powerful search and categorization. It seems that many apps excel at one or the other, but not both.
It’s also critical that these research apps be full-featured on both Mac and iOS.
That’s why Ulysses smart filters are so exciting to me. You can get more complex than what I’ve shown above. You can include parameters that search the entire text of a note (not just the keywords/tags), and you can also include “negative” search parameters that exclude notes with certain words. And, these smart filters also sync between Mac and iOS versions.
Free Apps For Writing Documents
My biggest quibble with Ulysses right now as a note-taking, researching tool is the way it handles inline images. If the image is inline with a note, you see an IMG markdown tag. Or, an image can be attached to a note, but otherwise not shown inline. It’d be great to be able to have images displayed inline.
Though, I do like how you can attach images to a note (if you want an image / screenshot nearby as reference material, but perhaps not as something you want to be in-line with your actual text).
So, all that said, I’m obviously now using Ulysses (Mac / iOS) as my writing and researching app of choice, and I’ve already begun transcribing all my book notes and highlights into the app.
And, as I mentioned, we’ve got something brand new related to Ulysses in the works. Click here to find out more.
Digital Paper App Mac
Stop losing your ideas and notes to multiple apps…
An online course to help you save time, organize your notes, and master the best writing app for Mac and iOS: Ulysses.