I have been using it exclusively as my primary—nay, only—writing tool. Anything that needs writing (aside from tweets of course) gets written in Writer. It’s one of those rare, special apps.

Much of what makes Writer special is it’s simplicity, and that’s why I was sad to be informed by the Mac App Store that there was an update. Updates mean bug fixes which is great—new windows always opening under my Dock drives me crazy—but they also mean new features, and that’s not so great.

Writer is devoid of features by design, but that’s not to say that adding features isn’t a good idea. For a writing application based on using a markup language it only makes sense to allow document export that uses and shows the markup changes. It also makes sense to get it to open all standard text documents such as RTF in order to allow their editing. What I’m afraid of it bloat.

For me, adding even keyboard commands for auto-markup does, in a way, take a little from what makes Writer great. It’s useful for sure, but not quite in keeping with the feel of the app. There are many more and better examples being thrown over Twitter, and maybe that’s the problem.

Pressure from customers to add, adapt, even change the philosophy of an application can easily overwhelm a developer. I urge the guys at iA and all other devs around the world—remember your vision and stand up for it. For the likes of Writer it should be pretty easy—it’s what made it popular in the first place isn’t it? Do more of that.