Pretentious post about writing

I quite enjoy writing. At work I write emails, workflow descriptions, user guides, reports, technical texts, marketing brochures and a variety of other documents. At home I mostly write dreadfully boring blog entries while imagining that my prose is insightful, witty, entertaining and respected. 

The tools I use to capture my thoughts and present them to my audience are amongst the most sophisticated ever constructed. The laptop computer, or any computer for that matter, is an exquisite piece of precision-engineered equipment that most people take for granted or curse as some aspect of its delicate interior (usually the installed software) performs less than perfectly.

The computer upon which I am drafting this article has been teased into existence through a bewilderingly complicated sequence of manufacturing processes. It has arrived in my home as an object of desire and beauty and will doubtless leave in several years having finally exhausted my patience and been replaced by a younger, faster, lighter, more beautiful alternative. Computers, like superheroes, die young or live to become the villain, hunted down and replaced by their more virile descendants.

And the software? It is easy to be rude about software or to underestimate the challenges facing programmers. Many people, myself included, are frustrated by faults, bugs, inconsistencies, poor design decisions or missing features that hinder their work or reduce their productivity. Building software is difficult; building great software that delights the user is particularly tricky.

I have been wondering this week about user-delighting, distraction-free writing software. Modern operating systems present a variety of distractions for the struggling writer. Email, Twitter, Facebook, BBC News and Google Reader compete for your attention. Instant messaging applications, alarms and task managers try to pull you from your task. Even the operating system tries to get in the way, updating, restarting or simply deciding that whatever you are doing must wait while it completes its own activities.

The idea of the distraction-free writing tool is that everything, including the controls of the application you are using, is hidden from view while you capture your prose. This leaves you looking at a page full of text, a word count and a page indicator. If you have a quiet environment in which to work, distractions should now be minimal.

My plan was to buy a dedicated application to facilitate distraction-free writing and, as ever, Google suggested several possibles. Byword (bywordapp.com) seemed to offer the right combination of features and price (£5.99, Mac App Store) but just before I bought I saw a recommendation for Pages (Apple's word processor, £11.99, Mac App Store) in Full Screen mode and, as Pages already lives on my MacBook, experimentation was simple.

In conclusion, for distraction-free writing on the Mac I recommend Pages in Full Screen mode. Byword's features are more specialised (paragraph focus, for example) but Pages offers a full suite of general-purpose word processing tools that you will need as  soon as your text is ready for formatting.