I recently discovered that I really enjoy writing. Like, I really enjoy it. It’s a great way for me to think things through and organize my thoughts. It also gives me a chance to express myself in a way that is constructive and healthy. Plus, when I’m done, I have something that I’ve work hard on, can be proud of, and can share with others if I choose to. Writing is great!

Like I said before, this is something I discovered recently. I used to think writing was lame. That’s because my only real experience with writing was with academic writing, something I still find to be lame most of the time. But I tried writing for myself instead of for an assignment, and I found that I really like it. The only problem was that the writing tools I was using were for academic writing, not for creative writing. And that’s when I discovered Byword.

Byword is a simple text editor for Mac and iOS. It allows you to edit rich text (like you would with TextEdit or Wordpad), but the coolest thing about Byword is that it also allows you to write in Markdown. More on that later. Byword syncs your documents between your devices through iCloud or Dropbox. That way, you can start something on your computer and revise it later on your iPhone or iPad. All of the apps are really beautiful. The UI does a good job of not getting the way so that I can just let my creative juices flow.

Another really cool thing about Byword is its publishing capabilities. These options cost a little more, but they are definitely worth it if you’re using Byword to write for a blog or if you want to sync your writings to Evernote. Whenever you’re done writing, you just hit the Publish button, tell Byword where you want to publish to, and it does all the back-end work for you. It’s really cool.

But my favorite thing about Byword, and the reason I chose it as my primary creative writing app, is that it is a Markdown editor. Markdown is a writing language that lets you do HTML-style formatting without having to actually write HTML. Instead, you use symbols to represent common HTML code. For example putting a # before a word or sentence makes it a header. The * symbol is used for italics, and ** is used for bold. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, Markdown is a powerful writing language. And I like it because it makes me feel like I’m doing a little bit of coding along with my creative writing, which is an awesome feeling.

Beautiful user interface on multiple devices. Excellent publishing options. And Markdown support. That’s why I love Byword. I use Byword to write everything for my website. I also use it for my Bible journal and for writing sermons. I once used it to write an email just for fun. Basically, any of my writing that isn’t for school is done in Byword because it’s the best way to write. I would highly suggest Byword to anyone interested in writing. Thank you guys for reading, and I hope you’ll try out Byword. I’ll see you on Tuesday!

Byword is available for $9.99 on the Mac App Store and for $4.99 on the iOS App Store. It’s definitely worth every penny.