For When OmmWriter is Too Zen, and WriteRoom is Too Clinical...

Theres a lot of fullscreen writing apps out there for the Mac, and each of them offer a different writing experience, for the different kinds of writers that are out there. OmmWriter is one for the writer that wants to free his or her mind, and shut out distractions not just on their computer, but on a mental level. WriteRoom is one for writers that harken back to a simpler computing era, when a program settles on a black screen with bright green text.

Byword settles smartly between these two extremes. Its for those that find OmmWriters approach a little overly soothing, and WriteRooms approach a little too spartan. Its writing environment is easy on the eyes, and its default typography options are good for readability. It doesnt block Growl notifications or make any sounds, so if you want your computers other activities at arms length, Byword will allow that. I also like that it has bold and italics as well as underlining; most minimal writing apps just have underlining. I also like that it looks the same in windowed mode as well as fullscreen mode.

It also has some interesting new ideas that have great potential for intensive writing tasks. Its "focus" feature, which fades out certain text so that whats most clearly visible is the text the writer needs to focus on the most, its "Transformations" feature that can capitalize, make upper case, or make lower case any block of text, saving you time. Its ability to type in both rich text and plain text (and switch between them) is cool, and its contextual popover makes it easy to tweak your writings appearance. Its important for some text to look different from other text; it makes it easier for a writer to visually scan different sections of the text. Its find and replace feature is also extremely clever.

The wordcount and character count feature is included as an unobstructive message at the bottom of the program, and it even says whether this document is rich text or plain text: terribly clever. Knowing whether a bit of text is Rich or Plain is important: plain text is more compatible, but rich text is easier to work with. A lot of fullscreen writing apps will only work with one or the other, OmmWriter will only work with plain text, for instance. That Byword can work with both, and switch between them, is great.

Some of the more surprising features include light and dark "themes", where you can switch it to white text against a black background. Its often much easier to see white against black on a computer screen, so if you need that sort of thing, Byword can deliver. The "dark" mode is a lot like WriteRoom, but its still very easy on the eyes, not just with its typography options, but that it looks much more natural and "soft", with its antialiased text, slightly textured background to look more like paper, and the background isnt totally black, like how the "light" themes background isnt totally white. If theres one thing that exhausts the eyes, its extremes. Paper doesnt look totally white, and it wouldnt look totally black if it was.

Inertia scrolling is a welcome addition as well, and I think the need to switch fonts on the fly is now entirely unnecessary. A truly elegant minimalism has been achieved here, and the addition of a huge drop-down menu to change the font on a certain block of text could easily mar it. If you really do need different fonts for different bits of text, you should be using a full-featured word processor, like Pages.

One odd thing Ive noticed, though, is that Byword will automatically change the font in the actual document, instead of simply displaying it in its own fonts without changing anything, like OmmWriter can. This is a little bit annoying, because if I open the document later in WriteRoom, the font has changed from its default font to Cochin, which doesnt look quite right. Considering Byword changes the font without asking you, and I have to switch it back afterwards in another program, there must be a way to display the document in its font without changing it in the document.

Still, even with that minor issue, Byword is a truly superlative writing program. Elegant, clever, understated, pleasing to the eye and full-featured, it really is a writing program thats just right.

Uberman5000 about Byword, v1.1.1