EssayKraft is a native Swift Mac and iPad writing app built for students who are tired of wrestling with reference managers. Write essays, papers and dissertations with a built-in reference manager, automatic citations, rich text formatting and PDF or DOCX export, all in one place. No subscriptions, no accounts, no juggling citation tools. Just a fast, distraction-free writing experience designed specifically for academic work. Buy once, own it forever.
I'm a student studying creative writing at Uni and as much as I love writing, managing references and citations in essays has always been a task that I dread having to approach. I previously used Word with a plugin, which was difficult to set up, and clunky to use; I spent more time managing references than actually writing the essay itself. Over two years, I have taught myself Swift and this is my first app. I made EssayKraft with one goal in mind: to let writers write, and leave reference management to the app.
I'd love to hear your feedback, whether it's about the app itself, the design, or features you'd like to see next. Thanks for checking it out!
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the part I'd want to poke at before trusting the citation manager: which styles ship built in, and what happens when a style guide updates? APA and MLA both revise their rules every few years, sometimes mid-degree, and that's the exact kind of maintenance burden that made the Word plugin route painful in the first place. if the formatting rules are baked into the app, a style update means waiting on you to ship a new version rather than a library auto-updating. how are you planning to keep up with that over the buy-once lifetime of the app?
@galdayan Fair thing to poke at; currently, EssayKraft ships eight styles (APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 18th, Harvard, ASA, IEEE, Vancouver, Turabian). The app will receive free updates for users, and every update will refresh the styles to ensure they’re up to date with new style guides.
Longer term, I'm planning to move the styles to data (CSL, the format behind Zotero) so revisions become style-file updates rather than app updates. This will be opt-in, EssayKraft never phones home and I'm not breaking that privacy promise.
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@noah_page1 that CSL move makes a lot of sense, and keeping it opt-in while staying offline is the right tradeoff. good luck with it, will keep an eye on how that migration goes.
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Native long-form writing app for Mac and iPad is exactly the kind of thing I keep looking for. Quick question on the sync: if I start a draft on my iPad and pick it up on Mac, does it sync automatically in the background or do I need to manually open iCloud Drive each time? Nothing breaks the writing flow faster than having to chase a file before I can continue.
@leo404 Thank you for taking a look at the app and I’m glad it’s what you’re looking for! If a document is saved to iCloud Drive, it will sync upon every save, whether that is on Mac or iPad, no need to open iCloud for that to happen. Just save to the cloud and use your documents as you usually would and iCloud will keep it up to date for you.
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Building the citation manager yourself instead of fighting a Word plugin is exactly the kind of problem you understand well enough to actually fix. Good call on skipping accounts too, one less thing for a student to worry about losing access to over a summer. Teaching yourself Swift and shipping this while still in school is a genuinely good first release.
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This feels very practical for students. Academic writing gets messy fast when the writing app, citation manager, PDFs, and export tool all live in different places.
I like the buy-once angle too. For students, no account and no subscription is a real feature, not just a pricing detail.
@vahid_davoudi Thank you! The pricing model was really important to me, I don’t believe that students should have to pay monthly for a tool, it adds up quickly over three years. Uni life is already expensive as it is!
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No accounts and no subscription is the real feature for a student tool, not the pricing footnote it usually gets treated as.
EssayKraft
the part I'd want to poke at before trusting the citation manager: which styles ship built in, and what happens when a style guide updates? APA and MLA both revise their rules every few years, sometimes mid-degree, and that's the exact kind of maintenance burden that made the Word plugin route painful in the first place. if the formatting rules are baked into the app, a style update means waiting on you to ship a new version rather than a library auto-updating. how are you planning to keep up with that over the buy-once lifetime of the app?
EssayKraft
@galdayan Fair thing to poke at; currently, EssayKraft ships eight styles (APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 18th, Harvard, ASA, IEEE, Vancouver, Turabian). The app will receive free updates for users, and every update will refresh the styles to ensure they’re up to date with new style guides.
Longer term, I'm planning to move the styles to data (CSL, the format behind Zotero) so revisions become style-file updates rather than app updates. This will be opt-in, EssayKraft never phones home and I'm not breaking that privacy promise.
@noah_page1 that CSL move makes a lot of sense, and keeping it opt-in while staying offline is the right tradeoff. good luck with it, will keep an eye on how that migration goes.
Native long-form writing app for Mac and iPad is exactly the kind of thing I keep looking for. Quick question on the sync: if I start a draft on my iPad and pick it up on Mac, does it sync automatically in the background or do I need to manually open iCloud Drive each time? Nothing breaks the writing flow faster than having to chase a file before I can continue.
EssayKraft
Building the citation manager yourself instead of fighting a Word plugin is exactly the kind of problem you understand well enough to actually fix. Good call on skipping accounts too, one less thing for a student to worry about losing access to over a summer. Teaching yourself Swift and shipping this while still in school is a genuinely good first release.
This feels very practical for students. Academic writing gets messy fast when the writing app, citation manager, PDFs, and export tool all live in different places.
I like the buy-once angle too. For students, no account and no subscription is a real feature, not just a pricing detail.
EssayKraft
No accounts and no subscription is the real feature for a student tool, not the pricing footnote it usually gets treated as.
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EssayKraft