A short time ago I discovered Write Room. A great app that blanks out the rest of your monitor and allows you to focus on what you are writing. Then the demo ran out. So I headed over to the site to purchase it. Hmmmm. Write Room is nice, but it’s not $25US nice.
So I went in search of another solution
And I found it. Bean. It bills itself as, “A Free Word Processor for OSX.” 
When you go full screen, by hitting Command+Shift+F, (there are probably other ways, that’s how I do it), and you get a giant blue screen and you start typing. I love it. I’ve been doing all my writing with it lately.
The advantages
Let me say first, the advantages aren’t something I had to wait for or work myself into. They were immediate and effective.
- It allows me to simply focus on what is being said, and block out everything else.
- This in turn greatly speeds up my writing.
- How many posts have you lost, or lost potions of because WordPress/The Internet failed you when you clicked submit? Too many for me to be trusting. Bean is on your computer, and you can have it autosave every minute. (I would like that to be more often, but it’s a small gripe)
- Learn a few key commands and you never have to leave full screen mode. Such as Command+Option+L to add a link. Or Command+Control+8 to do a bulleted list like this one.
- So far, it pastes into WordPress like a dream. Not everything does so this is exceedingly handy when you want to move over content and it has things like bulleted lists. All you have to do in Bean is File->Export->to HTML without Styles. This spits out the basic HTML you just need to grab the body (it adds a header and closes out the </body> and </html> tags which you obviously don’t need)
I’m sure it’s not perfect for everything. But so far, I’ve yet to find a solution that it is lacking. This obviously is due to the fact that since it does so little, it does so much.
And if you are on a PC, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sure there are other solutions for you, but they wouldn’t be on a Mac so really, it’s a lost cause. :D
