Remixing a dream writing platform

Write long enough, and you’ll start to have a good sense of how you want your tools to serve you. Your preferences and needs change.

What would your dream writing platform would look like?

What features would it have?

How would it help you with your writing?

I was daydreaming a bit, and got to thinking about the various indie products I love using, and how it would be perfect if I can have a particular feature of an indie app as part of my dream writing platform. That’s when I realised my ideal writing platform is really a mashup of various other products that I admire:

Indie Hackers - for the discussions format, forum layout, topical categories, milestones, positive, helpful community

Makerlog - for streak mechanisms, badges, projects, Telegram bot to web integration within chat group

Duolingo - fun and friendly UX (that mascot), ease of sustaining streak, sense of progress through a series of lessons with increasingly difficulty

Habitica - goal setting, progress, reminders, encouragement, mentors, gamification features (for gamers!)

Baremetrics - a personal profile/dashboard of writing data, metrics and insights to help you get inspired to propel your writing forward

Evernote - searchability, note-taking features, deep categorisation, offline-to-online features (e.g. OCR to text, great when you prefer to write on paper first)

Notes - a simple, offline-based writing progressive web app. Write notes and save them to localStorage. Service workers enables offline viewing. Add to home screen on both Android and iOS supported devices to use it like a native app.

RoamResearch / Obsidian - this are note-taking apps for networked thought and building a second brain. The app makers believe that writing is a tool for thinking, for helping people write and organize their ideas more effectively, and thus help them have better thoughts. I WANT that in my writing platform, because I use it for thinking, but I cannot network the different posts together.

Zapier / IFTTT - workflow automation, so that words written on the platform can trigger actions in other platforms, and vice-versa e.g. auto-share to Twitter, Medium, blog, etc.

It’s a crazy mashup of features for sure… but imagine if this exists!

What apps do you enjoy using and would love to add a feature to your dream writing platform?