Software Review: WriteRoom
Welcome to the first Eric: Unpublished software review! Today I'll be taking a look at WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom), software that's been available since before 2007, when its creator started charging for it ($24.95) and has since inspired a slew of other free knock offs and the incorporation of its main device into larger, more complicated and more expensive writing programs. But I wanted to try out the original.
The original, so to speak anyways. What WriteRoom does is simple, your screen goes completely black and you are faced with a solitary, blinking green box. All you can do is type and you are alone with your writing. Immersive and distraction free, the simplicity of WriteRoom recreates the minimalist, early twentieth century writer's bare walled apartment, barren desk and loan type writer in the cluttered digital world of e-mail, web-surfing and font book. Whether you're a professional fiction writer or a student trying to get a paper in on time, write room is an arm sweeping across your cluttered desktop.
If you haven't tried full screen writing, I'd suggest you download the free trial of WriteRoom and give it a shot and see if it is something you like. It is certainly worth at least that. But as form follows function, the minimalism of the program extends to its every corner and you may find that you'll miss much of what MS Word has to offer. While WriteRoom is customizable, allowing you to change that blank black screen to white or a nice shade of purple and the same goes for the font color and style, having to go to preferences to fiddle with all that, for me, quickly got tiresome. You could argue that's the point, leave it alone and just write (which I did at length during the course of trying it out, penning an entire short story in an afternoon), but don't expect anything besides the matrix-like interface and the same nagging feeling you get from a blank page.
The program does offer some amenities. Spelling errors will still be underlined in red, if you move your mouse to the bottom left corner you get a word count, the screen automatically adjusts so that you don't end up typing on the bottom of your computer screen and it saves to .txt files so there's no worries when it comes to open that same document in other word processor when you're done so that you can play with the fonts and get your work ready for printing.
While we all have WriteRoom's creator to thank for this great idea, especially if full screen is something you really dig, the present price, existence of other similar programs, and the incorporation of a full screen feature into more heavy duty programs such as Story Mill and Scrivener has put the original out of business in the opinion of this humble blogger. Those two other programs may be more expensive but they come packed with so many more features that can help you with your writing that they might be more worth buying, even if you only intend to use the full screen feature and ignore all those other bells and whistles.
WriteRoom may accomplish what it set out to do but it fails to reach beyond that in any way and has been overtaken by other writing softwares. I would recommend trying it to anyone, but I doubt more than a few will care to buy it, even if they enjoy the immersive writing experience. I give WriteRoom 3 out of 5 pens.
Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm an unpublished writer.
118 days to deadline, four chapters complete.