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Because these programs fill the screen they can also filter out other distractions such as email, Twitter, FB etc.” Just being able to see the text can be a real help for clearing your mind, concentrating on writing and freeing your imagination. “These two downloads take away toolbars, menus and other such clutter so you can focus on what is important – the writing.

#Dark room writeroom for mac

And it helps me notice the connections between things (maybe like my food shopping list and an idea for a blog post on food that keeps you alert when writing for long periods of time) if I’m a bit less regimented when first capturing my thoughts on paper.Īnother tool Jackson mentions – which I’ve also trialled – is Dark Room ( WriteRoom for Mac users), a free and really pared-down software designed to minimise distractions. For these purposes, I use unlined paper because I can make notes that are more free-flowing and then I organise the information later. This is a system I couldn’t live without – particularly when writing my thesis! Now, no matter what I’m working on, I have some paper available so that I can get things out of my head for later and focus on the job in hand. He starts by describing the benefits of having a pad and pen – scratchpad – next to you as you work to catch lots of ideas for ‘processing’ later. It was a bit clunky (I didn’t get all the boxes the right size and never got round to changing it) but at times it was such a life saver when I knew I’d read something, somewhere, at some point that was sort of related…īut like I say, for some reason we academics don’t seem to share these things with each other?! Perhaps we can’t find the time…Īnyway, that’s why I like posts like Making Writing Easy, by Christopher Jackson. The cover-page allowed me to quickly and clearly record a complete reference for the book and summarise both its content and what areas were of particular relevance to my own research. I still like to hand-write notes when I do an initial trawl through a book, so when I started my PhD, I printed out a batch of note cover-pages. The interesting thing about doing a PhD, but which seldom gets discussed, is the natural way you tend to evolve your own techniques for writing and researching. It’s basically a list of tools to support your writing by helping you manage the process more effectively. Sweet.As I’d decided this site was long over-due for a post on the actual nuts and bolts process of writing, I was grateful to find a post on Fuel Your Writing on Making Writing Easy: Practical Tools. Don’t hide it … exploit it for the betterment of the product. This is the coolest stance I’ve seen on having your licensing scheme broken.

#Dark room writeroom code

He’d love for some people to write plugins that extend his product and, as a result, he’s making minor tweaks to the licensing scheme so that people will delve into the plugin code and see how it works … hopefully sparking some development in plugins.

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Rather than be upset and change the code, he wrote a blog entry that detailed how to ‘crack’ his own licensing scheme. Someone figured out how to circumvent the licensing plugin and wrote him about it. Interesting thing … on the developer’s site a few days back, he talked about how he coded the licensing system as a plugin. WriteRoom is pretty darned cool and does its job well … keeps me from getting distracted while I’m You can change the text color, of course. After all, it appeared like it was the kind of app someone codes when they’re first learning Cocoa.

When it first found WriteRoom, I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.