App of the week: Phraseology

This week I take a look at Phraseology, a fully featured word processor for iPad that I have recently switched to for all my freelance writing tasks.

Word processors are funny things aren’t they? With most of us being brought up on a staple diet of Microsoft Word and Notepad, we’ve been conditioned to expect certain things like red and green squiggles underneath incorrectly spelt words and grammatically incorrect sentences, absolute confusion when it comes to setting your page margins and configuring your printer setup and of course, word art, the quickest way to drain your brand new color ink cartridges for those few extra marks on your school assignment on dinosaurs or World War II.

When you eventually switch from what you thought was the absolute pinnacle of word processing software to something simpler and cleaner, you begin to realize how cluttered and unnecessary all those features were. To be completely honest here, I think those squiggly lines that point out your mistakes and suggest fixes that don’t make any sense at all are the most annoying invention of the last 30 years. I would go as far as saying that Microsoft is to blame for the current generation’s inability to fully grasp the English language and spell correctly. But that is another article altogether now isn’t it?

I started working on Phraseology shortly after I took delivery of my iPad. Before it, I tried using iOS’s native Notes app but it was too simple (and I hate the way it looks), I then switched to Writer as it looked minimalist and had a great word count function, but it was quite a letdown and I am still experiencing the most severe form of petty buyer’s remorse know to man (that’s $5 I’ll never get back!). So when I read through the app description and scrolled through the screengrabs on Phraseology’s App store page, I quickly downloaded it and gave it a spin.

What struck me first about Phraseology was the unmatched simplicity of the overall design. The writing (or typing) space is uncluttered and the light brown background is very easy on the eyes, great for those late night pre-deadline sessions. There is also ‘focus mode’ which completely hides the toolbar at the touch of a button. The designers have cleverly put the tool bar to the side of the screen as not to draw any attention from where your eyes should be. Minimalism is the main theme throughout the design of the entire app and it is evident that the team has spent a great deal of time focusing on the overall zen-like feeling that Phraseology exudes. I love just loading up some decent post-rock, popping in the earphones and zoning out while I type up a new article.

At first glance, Phraseology looks quite slim when it comes to features but this is really just because of the genius work that the team at Agile Tortoise have done. All the necessary features are present and, in most cases, greatly improved. The live word count figure is elegantly placed in the top right hand corner, in the very simple and harmless looking title bar. Fonts and font sizes are customizable and they’ve integrated with Terminology, their top selling dictionary and thesaurus app. My favorite feature has to be the arrange feature. A lot of the time I’m just writing rough drafts for articles like these and ideas generally have a way of jumping into my head as I work, so the order kind of gets lost. Arrange allows you to rearrange paragraphs and sentences by simply dragging them into the desired order.

The app supports unlimited drafts and archives (obviously dependent on your storage space) and connects nicely with Evernote and Goodreader. Printing on Air Print devices is simple enough to understand and the email function works well enough to use this app for drafting longer messages to clients.

At US$3.99, Phraseology comes in cheaper than the likes of Writer and Pages, but I can honestly say that I won’t ever go back to the aforementioned apps now that I use Phraseology. If you’re a fan of doing your writing work on your iPad, don’t think twice about Phraseology, get hold of it now and thank me later.

Name:               Phraseology

Publisher:         Agile Tortoise

Category:          Productivity

Price:               US $3.99

Size:                 0.9 MB

Available for iPad