Launched this week
EssayKraft
Native essay writing app for Mac and iPad
121 followers
Native essay writing app for Mac and iPad
121 followers
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.
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.
EssayKraft