A list of writing tools is a displacement activity

Writing, focussing, assembling, editing, collaborating, feeding back, researching, structuring, outputting and publishing. (Updated Feb 2014.)

Focus through constraint:

iaWriter - "Keep your hands on the keyboard and your mind in the text". Has good reviews.
Byword - "Simple and efficient text editing". Also has good reviews.
Writeroom - appears a generation older than iaWriter and Byword.
Textmate - does text, html and a zillion other developer's things.

Quality:

Research speed and convenience:

nvALT - Speeds up that did-I-already-write-about-this? moment, auto-saves, does text files, Markdown. Nice. I'm writing this post in it.
Pinboard - elegantly executed webpage bookmarking.

Collaborating and community feedback:

Draft - its drafts are neat version control, has premium "ask a pro", updates frequently. (Has a no-going-back Hemingway mode, thought isn't the same as the Hemingway above.)
Poetica - "Get feedback about your writing from people you trust, wherever they are" - not released yet. Amusingly, screenshot critiques Word track changes and Google Docs. Reviewed by Rev Dan.
Google Docs - good at collaboration and export, auto-saves. Has automated versioning but without actual version *control*.
Editorially - "makes collaborative writing easy", via here but sadly shutting down.
Penflip - "helps you write better with others".
Authorea - "the collaborative platform for research. Write and manage your technical documents in one place".

Assembling, structuring, editing and eBook workflow:

Ulysses 3 - "All your texts. In one place. Always." Not tried, but this review says "the app reimagines the text editor in a way that visually resembles Mail and conceptually sits somewhere between iA Writer and the project-based Scrivener". Which sounds like quite a thing.
Scrivener - looks a bit of a mess to be honest. They also have Scapple, a mind map/words-on-sticks app.
LeanPub - "Publish Early, Publish Often - Authors and publishers use Leanpub to publish amazing in-progress and completed books". Costs $0.50 plus 10%.
Lacuna books - "the best way to write and publish a book". Big on structuring, rendering chapters and ebooks easily.
Quip - "Beautiful documents on any device".
Marquee - "a full-stack publishing platform... to help everyone, from editors to designers and developers, come together to make great content for the web".

Formats and outputs:

Marked, because between text and html, Markdown is the popular "intermediary" format, (like nvALT) is good at simultaneous preview.
Mou - good at simultaneous preview of Markdown, custom css etc, always seems to recover well from its frequent crashes.
And a simple Google Apps script to convert a Google Drive Document to markdown.

Online publishing and attention:

Medium - "A better place to read and write things that matter" - becoming a centre of gravity for serious writing, per-para commenting interesting.
Wattpad - an ebook platform/store/agora that isn't Kindleland.

Back to it now. Again.

rodcorp