Ommwriter Review

by Chas Culpepper

Description

“We are all that mercy of our incessant minds, swinging from branch to branch.”

This is the quote that prefaces Ommwriter’s product description in the App Store, and perfectly summarizes the design philosophy of the software. Ommwriter is built on the premise that technology is at its best when gets out of our way. 

To that end, Ommwriter is a word processing app notable for what it doesn’t offer. The feature set is sparse (but so is the price tag, just $5.99). You won’t find a laundry list of font types, Word Art clips, rulers, citation managers, nor even basic options for bolding, italicizing, or underling text, nor the ability to insert tables, video, or pictures of any kind. Not even spellcheck.  Anything that might distract you or keep the words from pouring out of your head and onto the page is done away with. 

Ommwriter employs what might be described as  “Zen aesthetics.” You can choose from eight minimalistic backdrops and seven tracks of ambient white noise to wash over you as you type (think bubbling water, wind roiling through blades of grass, that sort of thing). The music and the backdrops were chosen for the unobtrusive simplicity, and are quite effective at fading away and allowing the text to come to the foreground (where it belongs).  You can also select from seven keystroke sound effects to supplement the mood. These effects range from water droplets, to the soft pitter-patter of someone tapping their finger against a sheet of dry rice paper.

Ommwriter feels as much as a critique on modern UI design and “feature creep” as it is a word processor. It attempts to bring the user back to the core writing experience – the act of getting the words on the page. Formatting comes later and in a different application altogether.

When you open the app you’ll see a blank square in which you can input your text. Moving the mouse will highlight the square’s perimeter and display a series of icons along the right periphery.  You are given four choices of font styles and three options to resize your text. Fonts and sizes cannot be applied to individual words, it’s an all or nothing deal.  A small word counter tracks your progress in real time at the bottom of the text input box, and like all other icons, only becomes visible when you move the mouse. Files can be saved as .txt, .rtf, or exported as .pdf’s for printing. 

Access

Ommwriter is available for Mac, PC, and iPad for $4.11 from the developer’s site and $5.99 from the App Store. 

http://www.ommwriter.com/en/

Sample Usage

You’re looking at it.

*Although all formatting and layout was completed in MS Word. 

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

This is a polarizing tool. Those who “get it” tend to really love it and those that don’t, don’t like at all. The current users reviews in the App Store are generally favorable, but strictly divided between one–star condemnations and five–star praise. There’s no middle ground here.

As with any tool, practice makes perfect and it may take awhile to wean yourself off the robust editing features of Word, and learn to be “in the moment” with Ommwriter. The only trick here is learn to live with all your spelling errors until you export the text to Word and run a spell check.  

What the Tool Does Well

Ommwriter does in fact deliver on the promise to a distraction-free writing environment, but chances are if you’re really struggling with your writing there’s more to blame than just Word’s ugly UI (which can be edited and provides minimalistic options of its own). Ommwriter will not solve those issues for you.

What it Does Poorly

Chances are you will not write The Great American Novel in Ommwriter. It is a writing app designed to supplement but not supplant traditional word processors. The lack of layout and editing options makes navigating large chucks of text an unwieldy task. 

Also, the inability to import text directly into MS Word or Mac Pages is a real hassle. The text must first be saved as a .rtf file and then exported into Word. The intermediate step is unwelcome and may cause version control issues.

What happens when you...

Although there is no spellcheck feature in Ommwriter, if you highlight a word and press the ‘esc’ key, a drop down menu will appear in which Ommwriter does its best to guess which word you were going for. The results however, are usually way off the mark. 

Additional Resources

An FAQ may be found at http://www.ommwriter.com/en/