Technically, this breaks my self-imposed embargo on the word “Zen,” but I’m fascinated to see this stuff getting attention in the straight media.

“The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence.”

Uhm..? Help me out here Merl. Now what was the connection again between satori and platonic rationalism?

Spaces is definitely an advancement when it comes to the art of computer zen.

One other, which I’m surprised hasn’t been mentioned by Merlin, is the great Desktopple Pro. It is spirited away and backdrop all rolled into a nice menu item. Definitely worth the few bucks it costs.

While I appreciate the recent advance of simplicity and usability in software, I cannot help but smile at the story about setting document properties every time before you started writing. Why? Because Word really does a great job doing all that stuff for you while you are in the flow of writing the document.

The problem is: you don’t know it’s possible, and you can’t be bothered to read up on it, can you?

Word can use template documents, and it’s really easy to use them, basically you set everything up once as you described it above, and then you just save that document as a template. It’s a good idea to learn about styles (I use the german version, so maybe that’s not the correct term) while you’re at it.

There’s lots of predefined shorcuts that let you do all formatting while you write, there’s an outline that lets you elegantly move around sections or chapters, there’s autogenerated indexes and TOCs, you can use it in fullscreen mode so you just see the text, and no distracting toolbars…and it’s all so easy to use once you dig it, you’d wonder why anyone bothers to write another word processor at all.

It is a sad truth that I have only twice in my career met a person who would know how to really use word to its full advantage. Millions of people use it every dat but don’t know how. Even sadder because I have been able to teach the essentials to my colleagues and business partners in less than 2 hours each, because there’s really not much to it.

While it goes without saying that the writing you refer to in your post is an art in itself that takes years of practice to master, nobody seems to acknowledge the fact that using a complex piece of software to it’s full advantage must also require a certain amount of time and effort.

People don’t even bother to read the manual, as they don’t do with their cellphones, and then they bore everybody to death with stories of how they fail to use it correctly.

The real Zen approach IMHO to a problem is to try to make an informed decision of what tool to use and then to learn how to use properly.

To take it to extremes and really become a Zen master, you could use VI and Tex to write your stuff, apart from Q10 there’s no other editor that has less distctracting elements, and nothing else comes even close to the quality of Tex layouts. Both are available on Mac, too.

I write a lot of scientific reports using LaTeX. It wouldn’t count as zenware (at least not using my current Windows GUI; guess I could go back to writing everything in vi) but this post got me thinking. Quite apart from the advantages over Word regarding formulae etc., writing in a markup language allows me to concentrate on the content, without worrying about the presentation (a familiar meme from coding webpages). I know that the typesetting and arrangement is mostly taken care of, or can be worried about at a later date, and all I’m staring at is unformatted plain text.

Interestingly, students who are learning LaTeX normally find this hardest to assimilate. They worry more about why picture x is on page y than they do about the accompanying text. Flavours of Merlin’s perfect apostrophe.

In reading this post, apparently scrivener does not have a grammar checker … is it “to zenlike” for that, too? /snark ;)

Honestly, “zenware”? Just sounds kinda…blah.

I totally agree with the poster, however. Scrivener tends to get things out of the way. Because I write short stories and novel(s), there are some organizational details that I tend to deal with when I start a new Scrivener document. The difference, however, is that these details are creative in nature — I am dealing with the story as I make these organizational changes. In Word, I tend to get bogged down in minutiae, but maybe this is just my own bad habit…

Less cutesy and overused than “zenware”.

So many computer tools have gone bad due in large part to feature bloat without the careful UI design that’s needed to manage them: Word, Netscape, and the Yahoo! homepage are the first examples that come to mind.

I do most of my work in LaTeX, which as noted above by BenM naturally divides the workflow into separate content/presentation stages. The latest inadvertent hack on my life comes from my workstation not having LaTeX installed, so when I’m writing, I’m ONLY writing, and not recompiling the whole damn thing every time I write another sentence.

I know that LaTeX isn’t for everyone, but most of the same benefit can be derived from starting the composition process in a text editor and only copying to the WYSIWYG program at the last possible moment. And you’re less likely to get your document sent back to you by surly social engineers.

I’ve recently tried Windows Live Writer, and found it refreshingly easy to set up and use. It’s specifically for blogging, so that’s the best place for it, and it publishes or saves drafts easily.

I really like it and hope more apps are developed in a similar thread. Now, if I could just get the operating system it’s built on to stop crashing…

I totally agree with the zenware aspect (and that the name is cutesy)… maybe we should web 2.0/3.0 it! Take out some vowels, add some double consonants and make it a place to share stuff with friends! And don’t forget the gui’s!! Why Not? haha good god…

/serious : Sometimes the best form of zen is to find a way to not need icons on the desktop at all. Its very much the QS or GTD principle of mind like water… do the task at hand, use Quicksilver or Launchy and just open that one thing. Boom, you go directly there, no clicks of crowded and distracting menus. You do that one thing and then your done, move on. Haha I maybe even suggest turning off GMail notifier, Growl, Twitter, Chats…haha for the ultimate zen experience (SHOCK!)! :)

Sometimes, when I realize how little enthusiasm I bring to my own work process, well it just makes me sad.

““Zenware” is a little to cutesy; that’s just smart.” No, when “Zenware” is a little too cutesy; that’s just smart, is smart. to cutesy, is a valid reason for grammar checking software.

Other than that …

The term “Irony” came up a few comments back. Did anyone catch the irony that Slate mag is reporting on a groundswell movement away from MS apps by people who want to accomplish more? I believe (and I could be wrong - I was wrong once before) that Slate is a MS property.

Full-screen, text-only word processing? I have to admit, I find it more and more interesting how the Mac community seem to be suffering from DOS envy. WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was the perfect clean-screen writing tool.

When I did ‘zines in the late ’80s/early ’90s, I used to type everything into WP, switch to a Mac, setup the styles and flowables on PageMaker, and just Place all my texts one after the other. That’s task-ordered pro-duc-tivity, pardner.

The essence of Zen is simplicity. Zen art — gardens, paintings, poetry, decor, the zendo itself — are all about getting beyond the process and into the meat of things. Zenware as a term may be cutesy, but it is quite precise.

Darkroom, WriteRoom and Spaces, along with those other applications that clear the desktop of distractions, are about the essence of writing. It is true that I know probably one-tenth of the things that Word can do. It is also true that I do 99% of my composition in a simple text editor, white on black, with an occasional bit of HTML if needed. The lack of formatting ability forces me to focus on what I am writing, not just the bells and whistles. I can paste it into Word (or Buzzword) and tart it up later, if I need to.

I rarely need to.

All this nostalgia for simple desktops, text-only screens from the Mac community—and yet these are everyday possibilities for Gnu/Linux users. (I believe there’s even a distro called Zenwalk that uses the elegant XFCE desktop environment.)

A Linux box can be whatever you want it to be. Pimp it out with Gnome and Compiz/Fusion eyecandy, or keep it barebones with openbox or xfce and text-only consoles. That’s the problem with MacOS and Windows. No matter how you work, you’re stuck with the desktop that the corporation provides. And then you have to go pay money for software to avoid that desktop and its distractions.

Visit: http://pomarancha.com/writemonkey/ or write to: master@pomarancha.com

Some interesting features:

• Repository mode for storing notes, unfinished parts, links and other auxiliary texts,

• Jumps tool for easy navigating through documents,

• Intuitive and pleasantly austere progress bar for those who write stuff which needs to be of certain length,

• Typewriter sounds,

• Different colors for different moods

and more …