Welcome back to the iPad Advice for Writers series. I have a whole list of iPad apps for writers and editors I'd like to review, so stick around, fellow iPadders and those jealous of our considerable awesomeness. Upcoming reviews include Pages, Noterize, Office2 HD, My Writing Nook, Split Pea, iAnnotate PDF and more.

Today I'm going to start with Bashō, a writing app exclusive to the iPad.

It took me way too long to find the ō to use in the above app's name, henceforth it shall be known as Basho.

Basho advertises itself as a distraction-free writing environment for the iPad. If you are a Mac user, think WriteRoom, or the nirvana-inducing Ommwriter.

(Mmmm, Ommwriter--where I'm actually writing this post right now--the sound of haunted church bells echoing while each letter I type is accompanied by ambient clacks and superimposed on a snow-covered landscape where the winter fog seems to swallow the world whole... Apologies to PC users who are not privy to this sublime atmosphere.)

Whenever you come across minimalistic writing apps for any platform, you have to make some sacrifices. Basho is truly minimal: it uses plain text files to save your text--no bold, no italics, no hyperlinks, no headers. It's there for writing, not for word processing. For getting out that "shitty first draft" that paralyzes some of us (certainly not me, no). So be warned: there's nothing you can do but write with Basho. And that can be pretty scary. You might scoff and say, well, without italics, what will I do? (I tried to italicize "do" there. Didn't work.) It will be pretty obvious what's going on when you're staring at a black or white blank screen, your finger hovering over the iPad home button because there's no multitasking on your iPad. There's nothing left to do but write.

But that's what you paid for.

Here's the specs, then. Basho stores plain text documents that you can email, attach to email, or retrieve via iTunes file transfer. There's an undo and redo function, which is surprisingly uncommon in iPad apps. You've two font options: mono and proportional. You've four themes: black on white, white on black, green on black (WriteRoom style) and amber on black. And three different font sizes. That is Basho. Full stop.

However, a caveat that could be considered a running gag if only it were funny: I only advocate using Basho if you are using your bluetooth keyboard with the iPad. Besides how much easier it is to type and access punctuation on the bluetooth keyboard, it's also very distracting to have (in landscape mode) the keyboard suck up half of that "distraction-free" writing environment. There's nothing to be done about this on Basho's part, because that's how one types on an iPad. But the first time you open the app and that corpulent abecedarian headstone unceremoniously sucks up half of your distraction-free screen, it's kind of a letdown.

At the end of the day, I enjoy writing in Basho more than other apps because of that minimalist experience. I can put on some Bartok string quartets or Mates of State, whatever mood is striking me, and head out into the wilderness of filling the blank page with no excuses.

Recommended.

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Other articles in this series:

iPad Advice for Writers, Part I

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