Writer.app - a Distraction Free Word Processor for Mac

I'm writing this review in an interesting new word processor/text editor for the Mac. The name of the program is Writer.app, and while it will not become my main word processor (too few options), it is definitely a nice tool to have, and in my short time with it I can easily see its appeal.

What is that appeal? Well, for many writers (this one included), there are just too many distractions in my life, and all of them seem to pop up just when I "should" be doing something productive. There are sports scores to check on ESPN.com, email to check, blogs to read, streaming radio to listen to... face it, the Internet and my computer are conspiring against me to keep me unproductive!

Enter Writer.app, which fixes all that. How? The first time you start Writer.app, you will be told that it can't find the right "location" in your Network preferences. What Writer.app is looking for is a location just for it. What happens is that Writer.app actually shuts down your Internet (blocking all those distracting services, so when it's time to write, all you can do is write! Of course, you can use Writer.app (as I am doing now), with your Internet on, but if you have your computer set up to remind you of things, or to flash notices when you have new mail or blog posts to read, then the distraction will remain. But it won't be as noticeable.

Because one other thing that Writer.app does to ensure that you can concentrate on just the task of writing is to darken the desktop. As you can see from the screen shot, Writer.app has made it so the only part of my computer screen I can really see is the Writer.app window. There is a visible slider, which (if moved), will change how dark/light the desktop is. Writer.app can make it so the desktop is as visible as it normally is, or so that it's completely dark.

Finally, Writer.app does one more thing that makes it easy to concentrate on what a writer is writing, as opposed to how good what he/she is writing looks on the page.

Writer.app removes all formatting options! That's right. With Writer.app, there is no bold, no italics, no double spacing, no centering, no underlining... just plain monospaced text. All you can do is delete what you've already typed, but as if you actually were using a typewriter (and a typewriter without any WhiteOut), all you can do to "delete" words is highlight them, hit the delete key, and watch as they stay on the screen, but get struck through.

This makes it inconvenient, to say the least, to attempt to "perfect" your writing (moving things around, tweaking sentences to make them better), when you should be writing. Writer.app really is the perfect tool for that rough first draft.

When you're done, you can save your work as Plain Text or Rich Text, and you'll be happy to know that all the stuff you deleted (struck through), doesn't actually show up when saved. At least with Plain Text. With Rich Text, the struck-through passages remain, although I'm not sure that's all that much of a "feature" as it is an annoyance, as you try to get rid of them later!

And that's what Writer.app is all about! I like it. It's a great idea, completely free, and does what it claims to do. It removes distractions that keep writers from writing, and does it in a way that really does allow the writer to just write. Good stuff!