WriteRoom – a distraction free writing environment
This episode is the first of a new series I’m trying here on Write for Your Life – reviews in the form of screencasts.
We kick off with a look at WriteRoom, a minimalist writing app for Mac from Hog Bay Software. In short, it’s great. I like it a lot. Simple it may seem, but there’s plenty under the hood, as they say in some areas of the world.
The one key thing I don’t mention in the clip is that WriteRoom will sync documents between your desktop and iPhone versions, if you have both. It’s pretty handy if you want to make some quick notes while you’re on the move and then finish writing up later.
WriteRoom is available on the Hog Bay Software site itself or you can pick it up in the Mac App Store for £15.99 (UK) or $24.99 (US).
Watch the video and see what you think (best results in full screen mode). All feedback and discussion welcome in the comments below, as ever.
Subscribe for free
If you’re enjoying your time here on Write for Your Life, why not subscribe for free and get new posts delivered straight to your email inbox? Or if you’d prefer updates via your RSS reader, that’s totally cool beans too.
I really love WriteRoom for a long time and used it on a daily basis. It has great features and yet is very easy to use. I also really liked it because it’s kind of the original distraction-free writing app for the Mac, as far as I know. In combination with Hog Bay Software’s QuickCurser it was insanely useful for me for a long time.
But then I started to write in Markdown and I needed the feature to convert documents into HTML within the application I was writing in (cause I didn’t want to take that extra copy&paste-step into another app.) Which is why I started using Byword. Byword is insanely minimal and super useful, especially if you use Markdown. And it looks gorgeous!
Great video, Iain!
Yep, I’ve heard good things about Byword too and plan to check it out in the future. I may even review it like I have WriteRoom here. Thanks for the tip off Rene.
I use WriteRoom when writing short pieces – wonderfully distraction free. For anything longer or complex, Scrivener.
I’m just trying Scrivener out for the first time actually, seems pretty good. I was concerned that all the bells and whistles might be a touch distracting, but actually you can get rid of them and go dull screen. May well do a review/screencast for that soon too!
There’s a good book – Writing a Novel with Scrivener by David Hewson – that goes into how he writes using Scrivener. He covers what he finds useful and what he gets out of the way. It’s an eBook (Amazon Kindle), that was created using Scrivener from start to finish – including the output in .mobi format.
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Novel-Scrivener-ebook/dp/B004ZG7BMU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1309133007&sr=1-1