Well, I knew it had to happen sooner or later. As they say, “All good things come to an end" and "when one door closes, another is opened.” After years of loyal devotion to iA Writer ($4.99), which is an absolutely excellent app for writing, my new primary writing tool is Matcha ($4.99). Matcha is a new, feature-rich writing app designed to make your work flow as smoothly as silk. Matcha (formerly Wisdom Writer) takes the best elements of iA Writer and combines them with some of the best attributes of other top writing apps to create my new favorite streamlined composition app available on iOS.
Whether you are keeping notes for yourself, writing that novel, composing an email, or preparing a blog post, Matcha offers a finely tuned interface that puts everything you might need conveniently at your finger tips. With its useful extra row of keys, you'll have a plethora of formatting options within quick and easy reach. This app is all you'll need to get your text prepared in just about any way you see fit, for whatever your purpose. It's a versatile and practical writing app, and I've been very impressed with all the well though out customization that it offers, all without sacrificing its intuitiveness and ease of use.
Sometimes I pick up a new writing app to test out and within days, if not hours I know it's not for me. With Matcha it was precisely the opposite; as soon as I opened the app and got past the introductory prompts, I was impressed with everything about this app, from its feature-rich layout, to its ease of connectivity with Dropbox and iCloud. For someone like me, who spends hours and hours a day writing on his iPad or iPhone, Matcha is just the app I was looking for!
Pros:
Easy to view word count
Markdown text processor
Convenient sharing options, including reliable Dropbox sync
Full text search capability
Flesky keyboard integration.
12 color themes and 5 typefaces.
Inserting hyperlinks couldn't be easier.
Smart keys make scrolling through symbols such as quotations, parentheses etc., a snap.
Day and night modes with light and dark backgrounds.
Cons:
My only complaint about Matcha has to do with the iPhone version specifically. The fact that I don't have cursor arrows in landscape mode on the iPhone is a mild frustration, as I do use those keys often enough. The cursor keys are available on the iPhone in portrait mode and on the iPad in both portrait as well as landscape modes. I'd love to see the developers fix this one minor inconsistency with this stellar app in an upcoming update.
Verdict:
While I have tried innumerable writing apps, and have stuck with a small handful for over a month or longer, very few earn my long-term allegiance, much less with the speed that Matcha seems to have earned it. If you, like me, prefer to have one primary writing app, then I highly recommend Matcha.
This excellent writing app gets 5 out of 5 Stars from me.
