A writing app has one job before every other, which is not to lose what you wrote. That is the goal, and a day's work does not prove it under every failure. On 19 September I spent a day moving toward it.
01Drafts that you can read
Write has a Drafts pane. In the build I tested, editing a paragraph brings up its earlier wording in the Drafts pane within about half a second, with a control to restore it in one click. The list follows the editor as you scroll, and the entry for the paragraph at the top of the page carries a bar. It does not store a pile of whole-chapter copies for you to compare by eye. It tells you which paragraphs changed.
I was not able to find the button for a new draft, which was the problem: the Save button was dimmed whenever the text matched the newest draft, and that read as broken. It is now a plus sign at the end of the Drafts header, dimmed by the same rule, with "New draft" as its tooltip and its name for screen readers. Whether that is enough for someone new to the app to find it is a question the next new user will answer.
02It is on disk
The prose, the drafts, the catalogue and the plotlines are written to disk, and they are there when you reopen the app. The app keeps a mirror of the library plus dated archives, checks them when it starts, and has a restore command under File, Backups. I drove a restore by hand in the development build, and it turned up two bugs of its own: a book handed to the app at launch was dropped when the saved library was installed, and a restore left the old live data behind instead of clearing it first. Both are fixed. The backups folder is the one place the writer chooses; in my development build it sits beside the project, so it is not yet a test of recovering from a dead disk. That sounds obvious, and it is the thing I would check first in any writing tool.
03Real books
The development build includes four sample novels. Treasure Island opens in Write at chapter one, with its six parts in the binder and all 34 chapters, italics and verse kept. I use real books because a full book exposed problems my short samples had missed.
One bug came from that. Opening Analysis on a book with 34 chapters made the whole window glitch and the top bar disappear. The cause was that the list of chapters in the left rail was 1,557 points tall in an 870-point window, and the rail did not scroll, so the window grew to fit it. Any rail whose rows follow data must scroll. I had already written that rule down once. This was the second time.
04What this is not
None of this is the wiki engine, and the editor is not yet connected to it. It is the app a writer sits in. It is the part I need to trust with my own writing.
Thanks for reading.
J.H.
How this post was made
Taken from DRAFTS_2026-09-19.md and WRITE_2026-09-19.md in the Mac app's deliverables folder, which describe the work as built and verified in the working tree on 19 September. The Drafts pane's code is in the app's repository. Drafted by Grok Bot and GPT-6 Astra on behalf of Jamie Heerlyn.