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Friday Favorite: Ommwriter, the Zen word processor for writers

by Michael Grothaus Dec 11th 2009 at 3:15PM

More Friday Favorites, the apps, tools and accessories that we love to share.

As a writer, I love Scrivener. It's great for managing large and complex projects. But for shorter pieces, this blog post for example, I've found a new favorite, Ommwriter. Brett first mentioned the beta of Ommwriter here a few weeks ago.

Ommwriter is unique as a word processor for several reasons. It only has a full screen workspace. It lacks several of the options of most other word processors (you can only write in three fonts and three font sizes). Even when you minimize its window, there is no Mac-like genie effect – Ommwriter just fades away. But its Zen-like minimalism and lack of options are the point.

Ommwriter puts you in the middle of a secluded snowy landscape on a foggy winter's day. As relaxing music calms you, the words you type appear on your screen as if you were writing them in the sky. It's just you and your thoughts for miles around. And, from just three writings, I can tell you Ommwriter does its job exceptionally well. When I write in it, within minutes I no longer hear the sounds of busy London city life zooming past my flat. You really have to use it to get a good idea of how well it works. For a quick look, check out the video below.

In addition to the snowy landscape there are seven built-in soundtracks and images you can choose from. The guys at a Barcelona creative agency called Herraiz Soto & Co. [Ed. note: this link is now broken, sorry for the inconvenience] originally designed Ommwriter as an in-house tool to help their creative people get their thoughts flowing. Now it's available in beta to Mac users here. Let me know what you think of Ommwriter in the comments!

Thanks, Charlie

Omniwriter from David Wogan on Vimeo.



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More Friday Favorites, the apps, tools and accessories that we love to share. As a writer, I love Scrivener. It's great for managing large...
 

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12 Comments

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Dart Humeston

Wow. I've never experienced a writing software that tuned into my soul like this.

Wow.

March 08 2010 at 9:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Benny

I'm really curious about trying out Ommwriter now, even though I really love using Writeroom. And I only just got Writeroom for free about 2 months ago. Dilemma.

December 30 2009 at 11:13 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

When I tried this last week I noticed that it was dumping the entire contents of every file I worked on to my system.log file.

December 13 2009 at 11:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ferdinand

Really love the Application. I often minimize it just to hear the sounds. It really relaxes me and keeps the thoughts flowing.

December 12 2009 at 2:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Francisco

Don't know if you experienced what I did, but the first time I tryed I just started writing and writing and before I realized it, I had three or four paragraphs that made absolute sense and don't really know were they came from. Just amazing.
Really love the app, must have and it's FREE

December 11 2009 at 11:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Francisco's comment
Alex

Free as in Free ? … that is awesome.

The application puts you in a trance... formational mode … it is almost as if words started flowing naturally.

Agree.

December 12 2009 at 2:10 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kelly

Click click click... ( Hi, I'm typing in Ultra-Uber-Utopia ) ... click click click clack.... good lord.

December 11 2009 at 5:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Hobbes

Pretty awesome. Really liked the product.

December 11 2009 at 5:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
trayser

The third to last button is for picking the song.
The second to last button is for picking the keyboard click sounds.
There seems to be 7 different sounds each with a higher volume than earlier.

-satyakam

December 11 2009 at 4:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dave

Ommwriter and Scrivener are pretty much complete opposites. I really liked Ommwriter and have tried and tried and tried to like Scrivener, but Scrivener's "a preference and option for literally EVERYTHING" is so complete overkill. Maybe it's not that there's necessarily an option for everything, but that it's all on two or three completely overcrowded preference panes. I always feel like I'm going to make a mistake when exporting my documents because of this. I think that if Scrivener took a lesson from Apple's Pages on how to set up easy-to-use preferences and options, I would like it a lot more.

December 11 2009 at 4:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Dave's comment
Keith B

Thanks to Michael for the kind mention of Scrivener.

Ender - please feel free to e-mail me with any suggestions. Compile Draft is rather complicated at the moment and I'm working to improve it, but Pages and Scrivener are different beasts and in Scrivener you can format differently for export, so getting the options right there is a difficult balancing act. I'd welcome your feedback - contact at literatureandlatte dot com.

Thanks and all the best,
Keith
(Scrivener developer)

December 12 2009 at 5:36 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Thomas O' Malley

that's actually pretty awesome... just don't know what the third to last button does....

December 11 2009 at 3:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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