[tweetmeme] The Macintosh is regarded as the best platform for creative professionals. And very often you find nifty little applications that help you with your work. As a Mac user, I continually look out for applications that stand out in one way or the other and help you achieve your set goals. OmmWriter happened to come up in a similar fashion.

Currently in beta stage, this application is a no frills word processor with a little bit more than what meets the eye. As the developer says on Twitter: it not only registers your button presses as characters, it helps you write. Now that I was venturing into part time blogging, I had to check out how.

When you first launch OmmWriter, you’re presented with a fullscreen window with minimal controls. A screen with a background picture all the way from what looks like Alaska.

Here on, you can start typing whatever you wish to.

Interface & Features

There’s not much to the interface really. The window assumes full screen with no option to change it, to keep you focused at the task on hand. There is a resizable and movable area where all your typed text goes.

It has this custom fade-out menu with minimal options regarding fonts (a modest three), text size (three), backgrounds (three again) and the save/save-as/open options. For the skeptic minimalists out there, I might as well say that it has a minimize button, a close button and an almost non-existent scroll bar to it’s far right.

The biggest thing that makes OmmWriter stand out is that you have background music! The bundled tracks give all that naturist ambience making you feel like having trotted off to the woods early morning and settled by a lakeside with your MacBook. Good if you live in some kind of a den or a basement or even otherwise. There’s seven to choose form with the eighth option being no sound. At least four out of the seven are good. The track selected loops in and out all day long and you wont notice. Headphones are recommended for optimal experience.

There’s also this clickity feedback for your key presses. And you again have seven sounds to choose from, the eighth being turning it off. I set this to the “water drops” sound.


The characters of this font are actually drawn on screen like real writing. Interesting. The tracks are very motivating and inspiring and I was hard-pressed to not start writing a novel.

Not all rosy though…

Backgrounds. There’s just this one background that looks okay to me, the default snowy one. Second, the cursor. The whole while I was using OmmWriter, I was confused about where the cursor was and I always ended up deleting preceding alphabets. Maybe I have to get used to it. It’s the old school horizontal DOS like cursor. Not a very ideal candidate where you have a mouse to handle things.

Rich Text. All right, maybe it messes up the aura that the app creates, but is asking for bold/italics too much? Something that you could to make a portion of your text to stand out? I am actually a Pages fan and it has a really good no-hassles fullscreen mode. With iTunes playing music in the background, it forms a killer combination capable of making OmmWriter completely redundant. But that of course is another story.

You can turn off the background and the music to have a saner experience.

Finally, the ambience is a bit too strong at times. I mean, there’s only so much you can write with the sound of sea waves crashing on you. As for the subtle tracks, I was finding a hard time to not get lost and ponder over human life the whole time I was working with this review on it. And unless all you want is to scribble stuff about trees, birds and cute puppies, turning off the music could prove helpful.

Conclusion

I don’t know but I think the developer is not really sure on who this app aims as it’s target customers. If it’s meant for story writers, I don’t know how helpful it would end up to be with no bold/underline to mark headings or italics to emphasize on words. Bloggers should look elsewhere. Poets should be able to manage, they seem to be lost enough.

While it’s attractive enough, I don’t know if anyone will get much work done with it anyway, at least not in its current iteration. I typed out this review with it with music turned on (to give the best opinion possible). While not a bad experience, I had to save it as a plain text file (otherwise you can save it as a proprietary *.omm) and get the formatting and spellcheck part done later via TextEdit. PITA.

That said, I might be using OmmWriter to draft articles for some time to come, till the beta expires. But I “will” turn the music off from now on, unless I get a few crazy hours to waste over free music and snowy scenes. Having used WriteRoom, I can say that this light application can give OmmWriter the proverbial run for it’s money.

This is a beta release, so I think the developer would be glad to take a note of what we feel is missing from the application. Hopefully the final release will be everything to look out for.

Should you try it? Absolutely, catch the free beta. You might want to go through the introductory video on the site as well.

Bikalpa Paudel is a Mac user who’s claim to fame is shunned due to his shoddy internet connection. You may follow his rants on Twitter, and choicest picks of internet funnies on Tumblr.