Credit: Neil Edwards
When I think of writing, I think of sitting at a nice solid table in a quiet study. The room is lined with bookshelves, but the desk faces away from them. I sit facing a wall of windows. The country landscape offers a view that is both quiet and serene — a blank canvas for my thoughts.
Unfortunately, I’m sitting at a cluttered desk, surrounded by my 3-year-old’s toys. I can block that out, but what I can’t ignore is the litany of menus that adorn every side of my screen when I open any of the three word processing applications I have installed. The floating palettes offer an overwhelming number formatting choices, pagination options, layout controls and possibly every icon and menu option ever conceived by man.
Years ago, writing on a computer was far different. The programs we used had a single solid colored window, with a lone menu at the top of the screen. Each subsequent new version brought new features. Year after year the options piled up, leaving only clutter and confusion.
WriteRoom arrived on the scene a few years ago. Now a very popular Mac application, WriteRoom brought back the solid colored background and reintroduced users to a distraction-free writing environment. WriteRoom is great for getting to the point and focusing on the writing task at hand. Other applications are hidden. Your desktop is nowhere in sight. It’s just you, WriteRoom and all those words bouncing around in your head.
But I’m still at my cluttered desk, looking at a wall. Even without distractions on the computer, I want my window. More importantly I want the view. When my mind starts to wander the view captures my imagination and I can slowly guide my thoughts back to the task at hand. It’s a gentle process and one that I don’t experience when I’m staring at a solid colored screen. It’s a small detail, but it’s important enough to me that when I saw a new application called Ommwriter, I had to experience it for myself.
Ommwriter, like WriteRoom, offers a distraction-free environment. The interface, which hides out of view after a few seconds without mouse movement, is minimal, clean and polished. You can select from built-in font and size choices, two light-colored backgrounds or a snowy landscape(as seen in the screenshot). It was the landscape that caught my eye — finally, a view! Admittedly there’s just one background image right now, but I imagine that a customization option or other images, along with more font choices may be future options.
The Ommwriter team at Herraiz Soto & Co has also added another interesting feature: ambient stereo audio. There are seven audio soundtracks — three meditation inspired and four ambient tracks. You can turn on several different keyboard clicks as well, but I didn’t find them all that satisfying. Notably, there are few menu options and each has set choices. Currently, there’s no room for customizing the application, other than choosing from the options that the developers have provided.
A feature I do like is the ability to adjust the size of the text editing area. You can easily adjust the width of the page to match the size of your final composition. The width I’m currently writing in is sized to match our blog’s width. This gives me a great visual preview of what my final product will look like.
“Your goal is writing, not formatting.”
It makes sense to get rid of the all the clutter on the screen. Your goal is writing, not formatting. The final product is presented to you with the goal of readability: no menubars, formatting palettes or rows and rows of icons. Why should you have to work on a page that contains all that clutter — especially when so much of your time writing is often spent reading what you’ve just written?
If you’re a Mac user looking to give a distraction-free writing environment a try, you owe it to yourself to try WriteRoom or Ommwriter. PC users can checkout Dark Room, a free WriteRoom clone. Spend a few minutes and see what happens – you may find that you actually like writing on a computer again.
Ommwriter is currently in beta and free to download. WriteRoom for Mac is available to try for 30 days or you can purchase a license for $24.95. WriteRoom also has an iPhone version which can be purchased through the App Store.
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