Slashdot Mirror

You don't need a tablet to have a focused writing environment. Applications like WriteRoom and its Windows clone Dark Room have been doing that just fine for years. I'm happy for the author that he's gotten his ADD issues under control by getting a system that can't do more than one thing at a time well. And that he's caught up to the full day of work battery capacity I've had since 2009 using my Acer Aspire One and a 9-cell battery.

I don't know what OS the author of the original post is using, but if he's using a Mac, he should look into WriteRoom.

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

It's like writing on the word processor from the Apple II days, it clear all the modern OS widgets out of the way so you're not constantly distracted, and you can edit in any combination of background/text colors you want.

I prefer bold blue text on a black background. None of the formatting is saved in the document, it's only done in presentation by the app and you get modern features like word count and what not.

I can't recommend it high enough.

But hey, I'm an oldster around here, what do I know?

A mac user might think "I want to write a text document". And the mac caters very well to this sort of idea.

You give the average Mac user too much credit. Few of them even understand what a "text document" is. They only know of things that open in Word, things that open in Pages, and things that open in Acrobat (maybe - usually they just use Preview).

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine was telling everyone about this great new piece of software for Mac that would allow her to type on a screen with green text on a black background full screen with no distractions. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. She thought it was great when she just needed to write without worrying about all the other distractions on her computer. Of course, this "word processor" (as she called it) had almost no options to do much of anything.

This is the average Mac user. She had probably never encountered a "text editor." She didn't even realize that you could customize the appearance of MS Word to use it full screen, with whatever background and text color you want.

And many of her Mac user friends were expressing amazement about this wonderful new distraction-free writing application!

And so some Mac users will now pay money to get a crappy stripped-down text editor that looks like a CLI editor from the 80s and has significantly less functionality.

Oh the irony....

• No distractions. Full screen. Hidden menu bar. Hidden scroll bar. Nothing but text.
• In full screen mode text doesn't wrap over the entire screen. Instead your text is formated in a readable column in the center of the screen.
• Few important writers statistics (word count) pop up at bottom of screen, but hidden by default.
• Lots of control over the look (colors, cursors, and fonts and paragraph formatting, even in plain text mode)
• "Normal" app, user doesn't have to know about command line.

Not only that, but with the poor forward compatibility between OS X versions, he'll soon be forced to upgrade to use even the simplest of utilities. Yeah, I know, I'm still bitter that I couldn't run Writeroom on Panther.

I like WriteRoom for "Distraction free writing".

He's right in a sense, though. When you want to upgrade the software on your Mac, you'll often need the latest version of OS X as well. That goes for even relatively simple utilities like WriteRoom and Quicksilver. And, when you want to upgrade OS X, Apple will make sure you can't run it if your computer is considered too old. Then you have to go with XPostFacto, and an OS install that may break when you get a new security patch (happens rarely). There's no good reason for this -- Panther is faster than Jaguar on any computer that can run the latter -- other than that Apple want you to buy a new computer.

Microsoft? Well, they force you to buy to Vista if you want DX10, which demands a fairly hefty computer to begin with. Office users need to use the same version for perfect interoperability. When it comes to forced upgrades, Apple's hardware-software integration is much, much more expensive, and much more prevalent than with Windows.

Have no fear OS X users. If you must deal with Office 2007 just make sure you run within a virtual environment and that your actual writing is within WriteRoom, This will insure that you have a place to write think about what you are writing rather than having to convince the dancing paper clip that you do not require any assistance with making what Clippy (the dancing paperclip) is convinced should be shopping list.

I use Windows in the office, and, sadly, Explorer for the web. You can set the windows anyway you like, it's true, even make Explorer the full screen if you want. But then, any web site seems capable of popping up a window of any size, taking over my preference, and it is nearly impossible to change. I know, I've done web searches. The fix is of the "open the window, open another one, go to the first, maximize it, spit in the wind, turn around three times, and bang! You're-- Well, it still opens in that little window that the Poker/Porn/Pirate site made it be. So I think it's a GOOD thing that, if you have a dock, the window won't expand, and I've never come to a web site that changed my preferences. In the first versions of OS X, Apple apps weren't that sophisticated. But if you want an app that allows you to write on a full screen, with green type, just like the old Apple II days, try this: WriteRoom, from HogBay software. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom But here's a tip: set the dock preference to "disappear." Then click the green light. Bingo! Full screen now means you can't see the dock, either. Of course, now, every time you point your cursor near the bottom, the dock comes up. I know, ugly and annying. Same reason I don't use this option in (*&&&%%%% Windows.

• VoodooPad: An excellent WYSWIG Wiki-like notebook
  
• Circus Ponies NoteBook: A visually impressive note-taking app that looks like a real lab notebook.
  
• Hog Bay Notebook: Similar to the above, but lightweight and with IMHO superior outlining facilities.
  
• PersonalWiki : A desktop interface to the web-based ZWiki.
  
• Devonthink: A note/snippet/document management system, which includes semi-supervised classification algorithms.
  

I have found Hog Bay Notebook (for OS X) to be a great support tool for GTD. If have OS check it out, especially the new 3.5 beta.

Didn't do it for me. I'm partial to Hog Bay Notebook

Its got a nice mix of Outliner and Notebook features, which is what I think most people are looking for. Works for me.