Matt Gemmell recently blogged about his array of writing tools. While my selection is somewhat smaller, I thought it was still worth writing about the tools that I use.

I keep a list of writing ideas in my notebook. During the weekend I pick out what I want to write about and do a quick outline of the article in my notebook.

Once I have an outline for some posts, I enter them into
Pop. This is a minimal text editor for iOS that lets you write and copy what you have written. That's it. No saving of files, sharing or syncing. It is everything that many apps dread to be: featureless. This is where Pop excels though. A minimal interface means that I can just open the app and get on with writing. I tend to use Pop when I'm out and about. For jotting ideas down or expanding on my initial outlines, it's hard to beat. You just open and write.

If I'm at home I tend to use
Plaintext on my iPad. It has a similar minimal user interface to Pop but also includes syncing to your Dropbox. At this point I liked to have a hard copy of my writing, so that I can have it available on my laptop.

Finally there's
Mou. I tend to do final edits and drafts with Mou as well as use it for composing emails and writing guides. Mou has some nice features like split views, word counts and of course it's a Markdown editor, so I can add headings, lists and hyperlinks easily.

I'm also looking at
Scrivener for longer forms of writing such as short stories and novels. I've already done Nanowrimo once and would love to do it again this year.

I initially tried to use web based writing tools for a while there, but the simplicity of native applications like the ones I have mentioned are hard to beat.