Appletell reviews WriteRoom for OS X

Provides: Word processing
Developer: Hog Bay Software
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X
Cost: $24.95 (30 day free trial available)
Availability: Now

Word processing was the original “killer app” of the personal computer. For those of you over the age of twenty, be glad you never knew a world where you had to type important documents (term papers, etc.) and making a mistake meant retyping the whole page (Liquid Paper being akin to spray painting over a dent in your car and convincing yourself no one would notice.

Still, just because computers made editing simpler doesn’t mean that writing comes any easier. In fact with wireless networking and the rise of social media, it’s become harder as there are more distractions to pull you away from the page. “I think I’ll just pop over to Wikipedia to check out this topic. Wonder if there’s any e-mail. Oh, hey I just got an @reply on Twitter.” It’s easy to lose your focus.

WriteRoom is a simple word processor: so simple, in fact, that all you can do is write because it takes over your entire screen, with your text floating in the middle of it. Other applications are hidden in the background. WriteRoom features two modes: plain and rich text. In the latter you can bold, underline and italicize, as well as set color and fonts. But I prefer the default plain text interface; it’s totally Spartan and truly gives you no distraction, no mental offramps from getting your words down quickly and efficiently. Other viewing options include seeing invisible characters (like spaces and paragraph marks), and wrapping your words per page (which adds a border if page count is part of your goal). Dropping your cursor to the bottom of the screen gives you a word count. You can also configure the text and background color, the scale, and the font itself to whatever size is more comfortable for you.

Once you’re done writing, you exit the fullscreen mode by hitting Escape or Command+Enter. Your document is presented in a more conventional SimpleText-like window where you could copy it into another word processor for final formatting (like, say, Final Draft for Screenwriting).

As a word processor, WriteRoom doesn’t offer anything that you can’t get for free—but as soon as I tell my friends who are or want to be professional writers about how it takes over the whole screen and helps lock out distractions, their eyes light up. Is that worth $24.95? You’ll answer that yourself with either a puzzled look or a “God, yes!” For me, it was very much the latter.

WriteRoom may be based around a gimmick, but it’s a really good one. Someone once said “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I can’t remember who it was exactly.* Maybe I’ll just pop over to Google to find out. Oh, hey, look a whole website of quotes about writing. I think I’ll just spend a few minutes here before I really buckle down and finish these projects that need my attention. Oh, hey, a friend of mine just popped up on Facebook…

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*Thomas Mann