iPad journaling apps

One of the most important habits to cultivate for an academic is regular writing. In today’s universities, however, that can be surprisingly difficult to do, with the newcomer in a full-time post often swamped with the demands of teaching and administration and the difficulties of fitting writing into a schedule that may change day by day. At a pinch, with enough discipline and tolerance for annoying others, it is probably possible for anyone to simply sneak off campus, perhaps to a café, and write in a notebook (or even lock the office door and disconnect the phone and do the same). I’m ashamed to admit that, when I used a notebook, I would often forget to take the notebook with me, have to buy a new one, and ended up with little bits of writing spread across multiple notebooks; a more general drawback of a paper-based system is that the writing has to be transcribed later.

Whereas a laptop computer often involves a calculation including the weight versus the length of time one will be out and how much work one expects to get done, an iPad is light enough to take everywhere, even without a bag to hold it (which can be important if you need to give the impression that you’re dashing off to a meeting rather than leaving the campus).

One class of software that is useful for writing work on specific projects is general writing apps. Some notable apps in this space are iA Writer and Nebulous Notes. Each of these has a custom keyboard, which can be invaluable if you often make typing mistakes when using the iPad’s virtual keyboard. With the regular keyboard, it is impossible to change the insertion point with precision, often requiring you to retype significant chunks of work to correct a couple of typos. Custom keyboards vary in the exact selection of extra keys they offer, but invariably include keys to move left or right a character or a word at a time, allowing you to delete only actual mistakes.

Regular writing apps push one towards a file- or project-based workflow, which may not always be appropriate. Perhaps you have a flurry of ideas which you know are valuable but which don’t yet fit into a clear structure, and you just need to get them written down. In these cases, a journaling app is probably the best choice, since these apps don’t require you to make any decisions before you start writing, and their very structure offers subtle encouragement to write at least something every day. My next post will feature a table offering my assessment of four journaling apps for the iPad. Each of the apps has at least one feature that in my opinion represents an advance over most of the competition. The features included are all ones that I consider potentially valuable, though the selection of features that are actually valuable will vary for each person. Someone who just requires a tool to encourage them to write every day and to store their writing could profit from any of these apps.

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