Early adopters are touting the pleasant and focused writing experience it offers, and unlike its more unwieldy counterpart in Scrivener, exporting finished products is not an exercise in frustration. If your New Year’s resolution centers on getting your writing life in better order and making the most out of your writing time, you’ll be interested in trying out the new writing app Ulysses. If you’re looking to make the most of your writing time, try a tool or two listed below to amp up the momentum and guarantee that you keep every resolution you make. You’ve got the drive and the lofty goals, and we’ve got some tools to help you reach them. The developer of FocusWriter accepts tips.The new year is off to a rocking start, and you’ve no doubt had a chance to sit down and hammer out some writing resolutions that are sure to make 2017 your most prolific writing year yet. We’re lucky to have such a decent cross-platform app available for free, though there’s still room for improvement. Most of the basic features I need are there (full screen mode, formatting options, spellcheck), and a few I don’t (daily progress tracking, timers) but they don’t get in the way. ConclusionĪll in all this is pretty much what I was looking for from a minimalist writing app. It could perhaps be made clearer how to create a new “scene” since there is a prominent “scene list” side bar which helps to navigate longer texts (the way to do it is to start a line with “#”). I would also have expected automatic reversion to normal text on the line after a heading – it’s unusual to want multiple heading lines at the same size. It’s easy enough to type those in manually, but it proper support for them would be nice so that the formatting looks correct. These are available via the top menu bar, via shortcuts (customisable via preferences), or by a toolbar if you customise it. It has most of the formatting options I would expect – headings, alignments, bold, italic, indentation. This is a screenshot of my whole screen – no distractions whatsoever! I am using the “Gentle Blues” theme with a few tweaks. I’ve been drafting my blog articles using FocusWriter. It is easy to customise the themes or create your own. FocusWriter FeaturesįocusWriter offers a number of pleasant themes, from “Old School” – a classic green on black terminal screen, to “Tranquility” which lets you write from above the clouds. Another worth mentioning is Calmly Writer, which is available via the browser for free or as a paid Chrome App – I hope to review that in future. I found a few apps that met my requirements, but there only seemed to be one which has been under active development in recent years: FocusWriter, a desktop app available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. technology is available for re-use free of charge under a Creative Commons license. You could say I’m stingy, and that might well be true, but at least I’m consistent: everything I write on mindful. I might choose to pay for better software later when the blog takes off, but I wanted to get started writing without much up-front investment. My final requirement was that I don’t have to pay for it. So I was looking for something cross-platform. But I also have a Mac laptop for personal usage, and might want to write on that when that’s all I have with me. My second requirement was that it should run on Linux, because I tend to use Ubuntu Linux for my work (and I do count blogging as work). I was vaguely aware that these existed but had not used one before. So I wanted some kind of minimalist writing application, to provide a distraction-free writing environment with basic word processing features. I could use some web-based app such as Google Docs, which would be great for sharing with others for proof-reading etc, but would also be a distracting as I would be tempted to open more tabs.įor a real distraction-less writing experience I could revert to pen and paper, but I can barely read my own handwriting, and I do appreciate the ability to edit while writing. I could use a traditional desktop word processor such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice – but that’s more functionality than I need, and I find all the functionality distracts from writing. I had to pick an application to write with. technology, the first step was to write a few blog posts. Desktop App Review Icon App Name FocusWriter Developer Graeme Gott Platform(s)
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