![]() ![]() TextEdit Many people can get along just fine with OS X’s built-in TextEdit, which is actually a full-blown word processor. FoldingText lets you collapse your document sections, move them around, and reorganize them. When you’ve finished writing, you can export your document to HTML, or copy it to the clipboard as HTML or rich text. You can also move sections around like an outliner, but FoldingText is still, at heart, an app for writing and working with text. This feature lets you write longer documents, keeping a big-picture view without having to tediously scroll up and down. The $25 app is a combination of a text editor and an outliner: You format your text with Markdown syntax, but you can “fold,” or hide, sections by clicking on header characters. Hog Bay Software offers an alternative to WriteRoom called FoldingText, which, while not exactly a focused-writing app, does something interesting. I like Byword’s paragraph focus, which highlights the paragraph I’m working on while dimming the rest of the document. But if you like iA Writer’s approach and attractive styling, you’ll find it to be a great tool to write without distractions. If you don’t like what’s here, you should look elsewhere. In fact, that’s one of iA Writer’s hallmarks, love it or hate it: Little in the app is customizable. You also get a decent Markdown-preview window, though it’s not customizable. The app offers a formatting bar at the bottom of the window that lets you quickly apply Markdown formatting, even if you don’t remember which syntax characters to use. IA Writer’s Markdown support is very good. (I’d prefer it if Focus Mode highlighted the current paragraph rather than sentence, since many writers think in terms of paragraphs, but the app’s sentence-level focus seems to be popular.) iA Writer is a minimal, yet powerful writing app. The app also includes a Focus Mode that restricts the view even further, letting you concentrate on a single sentence at a time. While it doesn’t let you choose your own typeface, the company’s Nitti is a beautiful mono-space font, and working in iA Writer lets you ignore everything around its document view-I often use iA Writer’s full-screen mode to block out the other windows on my Mac. Information Architects’s $5 iA Writer wins hands down for simplicity and for its attractive (and only) font. (Note for this feature to be useful, the apps must use a common sync platform such as iCloud or Dropbox.) An iOS companion app is a nice bonus-if you tend to write on both platforms, an OS X app with an iOS cousin lets you easily switch between platforms.Data such as word count and character count are essential to many writers some people may also want more-advanced statistics such as reading level and estimated reading time. (Since OS X lets youĬreate a PDF from any file, as long as a writing app has a mode or view that shows your text with proper formatting, the app doesn’t need a specific PDF-export feature of its own.) Multiple export formats, such as HTML and RTF, for publishing or sharing your styled text.Markdown writing language, a simple syntax for formatting plain-text documents that can be easily converted to HTML for use on blogs or web pages. A full-screen mode, so you can shut out everything else on your Mac’s screen.A distraction-free environment-or at least a special view or mode-that allows you to focus on your writing without worrying about toolbars, palettes and other formatting tools.The first one is free, the second one is commercial, but you can pay the amount you want, minimum $4.11 I do use this program as my personal choice.Today’s best focused-writing apps are made with writers in mind and offer some or all of the following features: It comes in two flavours Ommwriter Dana I and Ommwriter Dana II. I used WriteRoom for free a couple of years ago, now the product has evolved and is commercial but surely the most complete of all. This is the environment where I use this kind of programs the most. Here is the list of distraction-free software for both Windows and Mac. ![]() It might sound simple or even ridiculous, but I am more productive when I stop receiving notifications and being tempted of clicking on that little red number showing unread email or any other procastinators. These programs usually are full-screen and only let you see the text you are typing, and usually plain text (without any formats). For anyone who works with a computer and needs to write text in a non-distracting environment these tools will be very useful. I am not a writer, but as many other mortals a lot of times I need to write long documents or put my ideas alltogether. Best distraction-free writing programs Wed, Oct 20, 2010 ![]()
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