It’s been more than a year since I started writing daily here on 200wad. And somehow, today I just got to a bit of daydreaming about what my dream writing platform would look like. What features would it have, and how would it help me with my writing purpose? 

I’d wrote something similar before, back in Jan this year. But after this long, you start to have a good sense of how you want your tools to serve you, so preferences and needs change. I was daydreaming a bit, and thinking about the products I love using or would love to use, and 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 - this is a note-taking app for networked thought. This app’s 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 200wad posts, 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. Not sure how any one person or company can even pull it off… but imagine! ???