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Reflections on life lived by a coast

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Zen and the Art of Writing

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Those cre­ative dudes in Barcelona are at it again: they’ve upgraded a charm­ing min­i­mal­ist tool for writ­ers and blog­gers called OmmWriter. Its cre­ators call it “a writ­ing envi­ron­ment.”

If you have ADHD or thrill to the joys of 3‑screen multi-task­ing, read no fur­ther. OmmWriter serves peo­ple who need to focus or pre­fer con­cen­tra­tion when engaged in writ­ing…

It’s also a good option for peo­ple who pre­fer to sep­a­rate the free-flow, right-brain act of cre­at­ing from the more ratio­nal tasks asso­ci­ated with edit­ing.

A Zen Garden for the Mind

Once you launch OmmWriter, there are no dis­trac­tions. All the menus and oper­at­ing sys­tem func­tions hide in the back­ground. Instead the writ­ing can­vas fills the entire screen (as shown below).

OmmWriter

If your sys­tem pro­vides noti­fi­ca­tions, OmmWriter sus­pends those noti­fi­ca­tions until you leave the peace­ful­ness of the OmmWriter envi­ron­ment.

Soothing Sounds and Visuals

OmmWriter launches with a sooth­ing sound­track, one that reminds you of foun­tains trick­ling in a quiet court­yard on a hot sum­mer’s day. The back­ground is mono­chro­matic, gen­tly pleas­ing but with­out call­ing atten­tion to itself.

There are two ver­sions of OmmWriter: Dana I and Dana II. The first ver­sion is free, the sec­ond has a small fee of $4.11. Read the devel­op­er’s “fre­quently med­i­tated ques­tions” for the ratio­nale behind their pric­ing. Theirs is an intu­itive and val­ues-based approach to pric­ing.

The main dif­fer­ence between Dana I and II is the num­ber of audio-visual choices offered (visual back­grounds and sound tracks).

    • Dana I offers 3 audio-visual choices.
    • Dana II enables you to choose among 7 audio tracks and 8 visual back­grounds.

Con­sis­tent with its design intent of utter sim­plic­ity, there are no options for for­mat­ting within the tool. You can’t set font fam­ily or styling choices, use bul­lets or num­bered lists. (You do that later with your edit­ing or blog­ging tool.)

Where Can You Use OmmWriter

OmmWriter works with Macs, PCs and iPad.

This lat­est release has been opti­mized for Retina Mac dis­plays and the cur­rent ver­sion of the Mac OS with its built-in noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem.

Files cre­ated with OmmWriter can’t be printed directly from the tool. Instead you save them to one of the fol­low­ing for­mats, for pol­ish­ing and edit­ing in a tool that’s been designed for edit­ing:

    • Text file (.txt)
    • Rich Text File (.rtf)
    • PDF

OmmWriter pro­vides an auto­matic back-up behind the scenes.

    Best of all, OmmWriter offers peace and quiet in an oth­er­wise noisy and dis­tract­ing world.

Serendipity, or Applied Intelligence?

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To help you get more value from my post­ings, I added the LinkWithin wid­get to my blogs today. This wid­get can auto­mat­i­cally sug­gest, for any new post, related sto­ries found else­where within the blog. I’m still get­ting a feel for what it con­sid­ers to be “related” — and am already chuck­ling at some of its whim­si­cal results.

What You See

At the bot­tom of each post, the LinkWithin wid­get dis­plays links and thumb­nails for up to 3 related sto­ries within my blog.

You’ll see the ben­e­fits of its “intel­li­gence” at the end of this and all other posts in this blog.

How It Works

LinkWithin chooses related sto­ries based on their title, tags and con­tent, accord­ing to the developer’s FAQ.

Hav­ing said that, I’ve found some of the choices to be quite amus­ing: it sees link­ages that a human edi­tor would never con­sider. Take a look at the post “Indi­ca­tors of Waste Heat” as an exam­ple (LinkWithin’s results appear at the bot­tom).

How did LinkWithin “see” the con­nec­tion between our cats’ heat-seek­ing behav­ior and a yoga retreat in Provence?

Well, it turns out the yoga retreat took place dur­ing a heat wave in south­ern France. There was no A/C in the yoga stu­dio or in the 16th cen­tury hotel where we stayed. Tem­per­a­tures hov­ered in the high 90s and above for more than a week.

LinkWithin must have detected words relat­ing to heat in both posts, even if their sub­ject mat­ter is largely unre­lated. Both posts were writ­ten with a some­what wry tone, although I doubt LinkWithin could detect that sub­tle aspect to the con­tent.

See what you think…