Prompts for Writing

First, let me start off by highlighting the app’s positive notes. As I’ve stated before, the app is easily navigable using voiceover, to my great surprise. The button labeling shouldn’t be difficult at all to get used to, because I know most of us have seen apps with similar button labeling schemes. The buttons are mostly easy to figure out, so using this app, for the most part, shouldn’t give you any trouble. Basically, it’s a great way to take notes, and you can set a time for a daily writing reminder to keep yourself in a good habit for writing every day. If you are stuck on figuring out what to write, you can enable their starting line feature, which will place a starting line that you can easily read in the text field provided, then take off from there. The writing stats are easily readable, and you are able to adjust the settings, as well as set a daily writing goal. For those who enjoy writing, this is a great way to jot down your thoughts, and if you’re extremely picky, like me, you can use this app in conjunction with apps like Pushto, which will push your text from a computer to the Phone’s clipboard. This way, you can paste everything you’ve typed on a computer keyboard right into the app, which makes for an excellent writing experience.

There are two main problems I have with this app, and they are big ones. First, developer response is lacking, so this is why I’m posting here to hopefully generate enough interest to encourage them to make changes to the app that will benefit us voiceover users. When my research led me to this app, people were saying mostly good things about it. In the past, there was an update that would crash the app, and when a further update fixed those issues, it unfortunately deleted all the hard work of some very unhappy customers, and even though current users shouldn’t be experiencing problems, I did notice that past users weren’t too thrilled when they emailed support and got no reply. I still wanted to give the app a try, because I have been dealing with writers block for a while now lately, and I thought this app might get the wheels in motion again. Before I made the purchase, however, I did what I always do. I check Applevis first, and if the ap isn’t there, I contact the developers to ask if their app supports voiceover, then begin the dialogue of how beneficial it would be to implement it if voiceover is not supported. Usually, most developers will get back to me, but I got no reply with this one. Still, there were the glowing reviews about the app that made something in me want to try it, and I’m glad I did.

I’m not regretting the purchase of this app one bit, but one reason I’m glad I bought it is to point out one very huge area where voiceover support is lacking in this app, and I certainly hope this can be fixed. If you remember in the description, a very unique feature of this app is the lightning bolt feature, that will give you that burst of inspiration when you are stuck and can’t think of something to write. The button is labeled, and you can activate it, but you can’t read the information provided as a result of pressing this button. From what I understand, the text pops up somewhere on the screen so people can read it, but then goes away to leave room for your project, and that’s just what I’ve discovered while testing. Whether it remains on the screen or not, I’m unsure. Pressing the bolt button doesn’t pop up an alert box containing the text so that it’s readable by voiceover, nor does it present a new element on the screen that I can navigate to. Voiceover does not read the lightning bolt text out loud, so if you’re stuck and need some inspiration, you won’t find any if you can’t see it, sadly.

This was a huge disappointment for me, because that was the main reason I purchased the app. I have many note taking apps on my device, and even Scrivener on my Mac, so writing and saving projects could have easily been done without this app, but it was the prompts, those little lightning bolts, that I really could have benefitted from, and so could other voiceover users if this functionality was available. What I would like to see is a way for us to be able to read the text when we need it, such as a pop-up alert box, or even an element that we can navigate to on the screen. Ideally, it would be nice to have voiceover read the prompt out loud, but if that can’t be done, the aforementioned options will be most helpful. I hope that bringing this app to others who are interested in using it will generate enough activity to encourage the developer to accommodate voiceover users who may want to use a great app with even greater potential!