If you’ve ever typed a long paper, you know how difficult it is to focus on writing. Not only are you distracted by other windows (I’m guilty of always having my Twitter up), but you become distracted by Microsoft Word’s interface. Think about it. Those menus upon menus upon menus at the top of the page deter you from actually writing on it.
That’s where OmmWriter comes in. This word processor, available in the Mac App Store, strips away all of those annoying menus, margins and headers. In effect, it simplifies the writing process, making it almost zen-like.
As soon as you start the application, you’re presented with a blank page. At the bottom of the screen, you also have a clearly visible word counter, which is sometimes hard to find in Word. There is also a menu on the right side that lets you toggle many different options. Among them are the background color (I opted for a peaceful snow-covered landscape), font, font size, keyboard sound and music. Yes, this word processor comes with seven different tracks, ranging from classical compositions to trace beats (track 03 goes really well with the snow). Wearing headphones gives the best effect, separating you from everything going on outside of your computer screen.
Once you begin typing, that menu goes away, leaving you to focus on your words. I found it really easy to get a good creative flow going, since I didn’t have to worry about formatting. OmmWriter lets you keep writing while keeping your document clean and aesthetically pleasing. If you do need to change something in your document while typing, moving the cursor will bring that simplistic menu back.
This sounds nice, but how practical is this program? One glaring flaw is that spell checking is not automatic. In order to check the document for typographical flaws, you have to hover your cursor to the top of the screen and select a spell-checking option. Hopefully, in future versions of OmmWriter, you’ll be able to toggle this on the really simplistic side menu. Also, the application cannot save files as the same type as Word files, but you can still open them in Microsoft’s word processor.
Overall, I really like this program. I could see myself doing a lot of draft writing in OmmWriter and then fixing and formatting everything in Word. At just five dollars, OmmWriter is the perfect prescription for writer’s block.
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