Filed under: Software, Cool tools
myTexts, yet another way to reduce writing distraction
myTexts, a new app from MOApp, caught my attention recently. It's another "distraction-free writing" app with some nice touches and a reasonable price tag. This genre of apps basically time-warps you back to the days of full-screen, menu-free, plain text word processing. The most popular of the comparable applications would be WriteRoom, which is in active development and, I believe, the original app in this category. myTexts adds some great touches to the idea.
First, myTexts uses a database to store your documents, with auto-save and auto-backup. Your entire document library can be searched, including the title, full text, document notes and user-assigned tags. Documents can be exported in a variety of formats, ranging from plain text files (.txt) to Word documents (.doc). You can even export XML/HTML. Tags assigned in the app are written to exported documents as OpenMeta tags, making Spotlight searching more efficient, if you're a "tag" kind of user.
Fonts and colors are customizable, although you only get two choices (shades of grey) for the background. There's a sidebar containing your document list, as well as notes and tags for the current document. Notes for the current document can also be popped up in a floating, always-on-top window which you can quickly paste to from other applications and which dims when not active. The sidebar automatically hides and can be triggered with a mouse-over, or you can disable the mouse trigger and call it only with a keyboard shortcut. There aren't a lot more features, but everything is keyboard-navigable and quite well-polished, especially for such a young application.
Like WriteRoom, myTexts is a Cocoa application and its editing area is fully-compatible with System Services, the OS X spell-checker and third party applications such as SpellCatcher X.
myTexts is available as a free trial, and can be purchased for 12 Euro (about $17US), making it slightly cheaper than WriteRoom (also downloadable as a free trial). If you're in the market, I'd suggest giving both apps a try, as they both have their own feel and features. The WriteRoom wiki lists a few other apps in this category, and I'm pretty sure WriteRoom 1.0 is still available as a freeware app if you don't want or need the frills.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
+. said 10:49AM on 7-27-2009
for anyone looking for the full-screen writing feature, but without the need for other word processing tools that WriteRoom/myTexts offer, i submit: Bean. a free/open-source alternative, that has "distraction free" mode included.
http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html
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error said 11:08AM on 7-27-2009
I use the (Apple) Pages '09 'Enter Full Screen...' view for this purpose. Just hit Alt-Command-U and bingo! Check the left and top edges of the screen for pages thumbnails and menu + text styles. This functionality killed WriteRoom for me.
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vandil said 12:02PM on 7-27-2009
As a writer with a huge technical background, I honestly believe any writing application that uses a database is a disaster waiting to happen. I always recommend people write in individual, discrete files, be that Plain Text, Rich Text, Word Document, or what you will. Use a nested folder structure for organization, use Apple+F to find, and realise the word got along fine well before "tagging" was invented.
If your word processing application crashes and you are using single files, you might lose an auto-save or worse the one file. Programs that use a DB can screw up the entire database.
Just saying..
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NeilM said 12:21PM on 7-27-2009
Using a database to store text processing documents means that firstly, all your docs are in one corruptible basket, and second that the database has to be backed up its entirety every time there's even a minor addition to it. This is exactly the problem with apps like Entourage, which store all emails, contacts and calendars in a single large database file.
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moapp said 1:17PM on 7-27-2009
I am aware of that possible dealbreaker and working on a solution to treat entries as individual files and to improve the 'auto-backup' to avoid a loss of all data :-)
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Andrew said 1:46PM on 7-27-2009
They actually charge money for this?
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timepilot84 said 3:31PM on 7-27-2009
Wow. That's some serious innovations right there. Copying Wordperfect for DOS. Microsoft had this functionality nearly 30 years ago.
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Rego said 2:26PM on 7-27-2009
It wasn't clear to me whether this was a Mac app or an iPhone/iPod Touch app. It would be helpful to start articles with that info, without the need to click on the app to find out.
Text edit (free) does a good job for me.
I personally don't like typing on or reading documents not on a white background.
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Nabeel88 said 12:05AM on 7-28-2009
No idea why everyone is so hard on this guy. This is a great app that expands the functionality of WriteRoom which has been popular for while in the OS X community. The new notes feature is a great improvement and the author of the program has agreed to change the database feature(until then you can save your files as a .doc).
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minicapt1 said 6:50AM on 7-28-2009
"Microsoft had this functionality nearly 30 years ago."
One wonders which hardware, and which software.
Cheers
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