There are a lot of no frills word processors out there, but I love to think back to my Brother Word Processor days when all I saw were the words on the screen. No menus, no icons, no rulers, no toolboxes, etc. I know that Word and Pages both provide a full screen minimalistic approach, but it just isn’t enough for me or less I should say. You see I wanted even less. Let me introduce you to Ommwriter. A word processing program for Mac and PC. It eliminates pretty much everything and gives you the writing experience you’ve been longing for. Read on past the break to get all the zen-like details.
Let’s be honest-this is not a full fledged word processing program and it certainly does not preset itself as such. If you are looking for a program with loads of features to format, then you need Word, Pages, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc. This is for writing and getting ALL distractions out of the way so you can focus on ideas and ideas only.
When you open Ommwriter, it encourages you to plug in your headphones to help enhance their sound effects and music, and to help block out distractions. Immediately you know you’re into something different. You are not looking at a white background, but a beautiful snowy scene. It is accompanied with relaxing music that loops over and over. When you start typing you are “welcomed” with tones each time your fingers press a key. Now some of you may be saying, I HATE THAT! Calm down, you can change the background to other soothing scenes (including just colors) and the sounds can be changed or turned off all together.
When you start typing the options on the left hand side and the document borders fade away leaving you with your thoughts, and little else. You can save it as a simple text file (.txt) or a PDF. There is no way to add images, tables, or WordArt (at least none that I can see). Even spellcheck is off (you can turn it on if you want) to help keep you from breaking your stream of ideas.
In short, this is a great, inexpensive program to have kids sit down and write on. It lets them focus completely on what they need to do.
OmmWriter has two versions that are basically the same. Dana 1 is totally free and has most of the features as Dana 2. Dana 2 costs at least $4.11 (you can pay more if you like). Either way you are going to enjoy this program. It doesn’t have any distractions and is somehow humanizing and less mechanical as the bigger more robust word processing programs. Heck, I often blog on it and then copy and paste it into WordPress. Give it a try, it’s free for crying out loud, I guess I mean, for calming, relaxing, and interrupted thoughts. 🙂
Technology in the Classroom 