Probably not for me, but interesting. It looks a little like Ulysses and seems to work a little like Writers Blocks - https://speare.com

One more subscription application. I'm not a fan of that marketing model, but I appreciate the need for well-funded developers.

Thanks for bringing our attention to this interesting writing app. That the writing box is at the bottom of the screen is problematic, I think. Most people prefer to look at the center of the screen. I bet they change that in the near future.

With a cloud-only app like this, subscription is really the only viable payment model, because what is there to actually own? It seems pricey to me, though. But good luck to them.

Steve Z.

This subscription economy is a real bubble. Will not survive because soon having your own program will be a good USP for some new on the market developers. I expect a dotcom crash like rebound until 2020.

Seriously asking $100 for a writing toy that features minimalism as it's core value has some sort of braindead consumer society to me.

I mean, I'm already out on the grounds that it's a subscription model, but I find their attempt at marketing amusing...I have to scroll past a stock photography model and a video of a dog before I can even see what the app looks like.

Once I get there, it does look interesting, but I'd have already clicked the back button before I even saw it were it not a recommendation from this forum.

hilarious brat.

It's an interesting catchphrase for software to make writing fun. Fun with writing starts with a Big Chief tablet and a pencil. I obsess over writing tools, but that's the baseline requirement for getting a kick out of writing.

My grandpa gave me a portable Smith Corona when I was still in elementary school. That was life-changing. Sitting in the back seat of the family Rambler on the road, typing stuff. Whatever came to mind. Stories. Letters. Great fun.

Then came the day my Dad bought a Selectric. I'll never forget rolling a sheet of paper into it one day and thinking it wasn't the same thing as my S-C portable. That Selectric was a mighty engine of communication. That I couldn't influence the course of starships in the galaxy wasn't the Selectric's fault. If the starships had been there, that electric typewriter and a first class stamp would have done fine.

Fortunately, for whatever subscription bubble may burst, open source projects will never disappear.

I like my pretty tools. Emacs works, too. With a spoon I can tunnel out of Alcatraz, and with that Big Chief tablet I can tell the story.

Ah, the IBM Selectric. What a wonderful machine. I and two friends ran a student magazine from one at university. The Selectric itself was highly prized. If you wanted to bring a rival magazine to its knees, you "liberated" (i.e. stole) its Selectric. This was especially prone to happen if your magazine was political in some way. Fortunately, our magazine was listings and reviews, so it never happened to ours. Happy days!

Their privacy policy is vague about security and encryption. Bad policy.

What appears to be a desktop version of the same app is available for download from the developers' site -- "Ribozum Author"

http://www.ribozum.com

Do you have a direct link to the desktop download? I couldn't find it on ribozum.com. Registering for an account doesn't seem to accomplish anything.

Their Kickstarter last year was a failure:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/speare/speare-a-revolutionary-writing-experience

I kinda like the software, but their oddball website, failed Kickstarter, dodgy security policy, and Facebook page that hasn't been updated since August 2016 make me reluctant to use it.

Paul Korm wrote:

Their privacy policy is vague about security and encryption. Bad
policy.

What appears to be a desktop version of the same app is available for
download from the developers' site -- "Ribozum Author"

http://www.ribozum.com

Click the link I posted, scroll down to "Get the windows app for free", click "Get the App", register with a phony email address (they don't send any email so it doesn't matter). It took me a while to realize that as soon as I was registered I was logged in, so I clicked again on Get the App and was taken to a download page. Don't forget to copy the license number before downloading because you'll never have another opportunity to do that.

Much of their website is non-functioning abandonware -- which could be indicative of the future for the the products, too.

bobmclain wrote:

Do you have a direct link to the desktop download? I couldn't find it on
ribozum.com. Registering for an account doesn't seem to accomplish
anything.

Amontillado wrote:

Probably not for me, but interesting. It looks a little like Ulysses and
seems to work a little like Writers Blocks - https://speare.com

In a recent thread http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/7783/10 Brainstorm was briefly discussed. After viewing Speare's first tutorial video, I'd say that it's as closer to a contemporary implementation of Brainstorm as anything I've seen. This is exactly how I (still) mostly use Brainstorm: keeping several windows (of the same or various documents) open, and organising content as paragraph blocks, within each and from one to the other.

And of course it is rich / styled content capable, including images and videos, as one would expect from a contemporary programme.

It's interesting how some content development concepts come back under new implementations. I wonder whether Speare's developer is aware of Brainstorm.

Hello Everyone,

My family is the developers of the Speare word processor. This thread about Speare is good candid feedback for us. We appreciate the messages and we're learning from them.

Thank you!

Kent

Speare has evolved a great deal since this early thread about the writing app. Here's an overview of the latest iteration:

https://youtu.be/7iBGNaBvc74?si=27xqyi8yZjFjvh8e

It seems a highly flexible writing environment. I'm giving it a try and will report back what I find.

Steve

Hi Steve

Many thanks for the heads-up on Speare.
It has been on my radar for a long time and the development of this tool is impressive.

It ticks many important boxes for me:
- Printing (yes, I am old school and I like reading and reviewing texts on real paper.)
- Stacks
- Paragraph editor
- Split screens
- Databases
- Bi-directional links

I will give it another try again soon.

Dominik

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

It seems a highly flexible writing environment. I'm giving it a try and
will report back what I find.

Steve

I watched the video.
And looked at the price.
More than twice the price of Ulysses and at a similar level to Dabble and other niche products.
But afaics it doesn't have those niche features. Export options are no better than a standard markdown editor.

I look at Lattics (a pretty complete free version with pricing at about one fifth of Speare's) which has more features (oc it's easy to disagree about which ones matter) and much better export. Look and feel not a million miles away. Implementation of some features is different: in the video tags seem cumbersome and there are wikilinks; in Lattics, there are #tags and @links and backlinks. I find it hard to see why I would use Speare instead of Lattics. I'll be interested to read your observations when you report back.

What I would say is that for this type of use (writing/notes) apps like these are way beyond programs like Obsidian in usability. Though they lack the safety backup of being based on simple, accessible files in the file system.

@Dormouse, Ulysses is strictly Apple products, which doesn't work for me, because I spend my work days on Windows. Dabble and other apps like it really focus on long-form fiction writing. Whereas, Speare looks as if it will work well for writing of most kinds and of any length. I'll see if I continue to agree with that assessment after I've used it more.

Steve

Has anyone ended up tryng out Speare?
There has been no development of the app since May last year (2025), the website is still 2025, and I have sent an email to support a couple of times over the last few weeks but have never heard back. So, I am wondering if anyone is still using it and what their experience has been of the app.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

@Dormouse, Ulysses is strictly Apple products, which doesn't work for
me, because I spend my work days on Windows. Dabble and other apps like
it really focus on long-form fiction writing. Whereas, Speare looks as
if it will work well for writing of most kinds and of any length. I'll
see if I continue to agree with that assessment after I've used it more.


Steve

I had tried Speare a couple of years ago. It has some useful and almost unique features. But I ran into a bug of some kind (I don't remember what now), so stopped using it. The developer tried to help me out, but by then I'd moved on. I think he is a single developer, which may explain the slowness of development and the fact that the date on the website hasn't been changed. I did get the feeling from my interactions with him that he genuinely was trying to make a good product. Still, if no one is subscribing, maybe he's put it on the back burner.

Darren McDonald wrote:

Has anyone ended up tryng out Speare?
There has been no development of the app since May last year (2025), the
website is still 2025, and I have sent an email to support a couple of
times over the last few weeks but have never heard back. So, I am
wondering if anyone is still using it and what their experience has been
of the app.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
@Dormouse, Ulysses is strictly Apple products, which doesn't work for
>me, because I spend my work days on Windows. Dabble and other apps like
>it really focus on long-form fiction writing. Whereas, Speare looks as
>if it will work well for writing of most kinds and of any length. I'll
>see if I continue to agree with that assessment after I've used it
more.
>
>
>Steve

I hope that the developer is still interested in developing Speare, even if it is on the back burner.
I still have not received any reply to my email enquiries that were about subscriptions.
I wanted to try Speare out as it appears to have some tools that would help me work on the process of drafting a research paper.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I had tried Speare a couple of years ago. It has some useful and almost
unique features. But I ran into a bug of some kind (I don't remember
what now), so stopped using it. The developer tried to help me out, but
by then I'd moved on. I think he is a single developer, which may
explain the slowness of development and the fact that the date on the
website hasn't been changed. I did get the feeling from my interactions
with him that he genuinely was trying to make a good product. Still, if
no one is subscribing, maybe he's put it on the back burner.

Darren McDonald wrote:
Has anyone ended up tryng out Speare?
>There has been no development of the app since May last year (2025),
the
>website is still 2025, and I have sent an email to support a couple of
>times over the last few weeks but have never heard back. So, I am
>wondering if anyone is still using it and what their experience has
been
>of the app.
>
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>@Dormouse, Ulysses is strictly Apple products, which doesn't work for
>>me, because I spend my work days on Windows. Dabble and other apps
like
>>it really focus on long-form fiction writing. Whereas, Speare looks as
>>if it will work well for writing of most kinds and of any length. I'll
>>see if I continue to agree with that assessment after I've used it
>more.
>>
>>
>>Steve

FWIW, Adguard calls this a malware/phishing site.

Darren McDonald wrote:

Has anyone ended up tryng out Speare?
There has been no development of the app since May last year (2025), the
website is still 2025, and I have sent an email to support a couple of
times over the last few weeks but have never heard back. So, I am
wondering if anyone is still using it and what their experience has been
of the app.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
@Dormouse, Ulysses is strictly Apple products, which doesn't work for
>me, because I spend my work days on Windows. Dabble and other apps like
>it really focus on long-form fiction writing. Whereas, Speare looks as
>if it will work well for writing of most kinds and of any length. I'll
>see if I continue to agree with that assessment after I've used it
more.
>
>
>Steve

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

@Dormouse, Ulysses is strictly Apple products, which doesn't work for
me, because I spend my work days on Windows. Dabble and other apps like
it really focus on long-form fiction writing. Whereas, Speare looks as
if it will work well for writing of most kinds and of any length. I'll
see if I continue to agree with that assessment after I've used it more.

FYI a friend uses Typora for WYSIWYG Markdown. Available for Mac and Windows. It was in beta for nearly a decade and is rock solid. Though it doesn't try to duplicate the features of Ulysses it's very good at what it does.

https://typora.io/

Probably the other main contenders are the freeware apps Zettlr and Joplin.