Slate Magazine on the market for "Zenware"

wood.tang — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:21:16 -0500

Sort of an add-on to the New York Times piece Merlin linked the other day about Scrivener and its cohort of new writing applications, Jeffrey MacIntyre at Slate coins a new term for programs that eschew the familiar, bloated twiddliness of Microsoft Ofﬁce for simplicity:

There’s an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed trafﬁc calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you’re used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you’ll beneﬁt most from their absence.

MacIntyre’s word processor of choice is WriteRoom, but he also includes desktop managers like Spaces, Spirited Away, and various interface tweaks in the zenware category.

I’m a Scrivener fan, and like everyone who’s dealt with the auto-formatting, self-correcting madness of Word out of sheer necessity for all these years, the most drastic change I noticed when I started using it was that it let me jump right in and start writing. This may have been my own form of procrastination, but I always had this little ritual with Word every time I started a new document: set the margins, adjust the font, ﬁll the headers and footers, etc. You still have to do this with Scrivener and its ilk, but the trick is that it’s done after the fact, when you’re ﬁnished writing and you’re ready to export for printing or emailing. It’s an artful dodge; Scrivener didn’t remove or try to automate the necessity of formatting, it just shifted its timing to a place more conducive to the writing process. “Zenware” is a little too cutesy; that’s just smart.

”Slate Magazine on the market for "Zenware"” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps

Merlin — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:57:38 -0500

An Interface of One’s Own

I was delighted to see my favorite OS X writing app, Scrivener, turn up in today’s “The Medium” column of the New York Times Magazine. I reviewed Scrivener about a year ago, and still use it whenever I have to research, plan, and draft anything more complicated than a blog post. In fact, as luck would have it, I was actually working on my upcoming Macworld talk in Scrivener when I took a break to read the paper and saw this article. Kismet or something.

Columnist, Virginia Heffernan, notes the app’s beloved full-screen capability:

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

High ﬁves to other great apps mentioned in the article, including Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer. Slightly lower ﬁves go to Microsoft Word, which, once again, takes its usual drubbing as The Application Everyone Wants To Get Away From™. Poor Microsoft Word, the mascara-smeared Gloria Swanson of word processors.

In the year since I wrote my own review of Scrivener, I still ﬁnd myself relying heavily on it for housing the research, braindumps, and very early draft shapes of most longer pieces I do. Falling somewhere between OmniOutliner, DevonTHINK, and the aforementioned WriteRoom, Scrivener is still, in my opinion, the go-to app for all-in-one research and writing.

As ever, YMMV. This app is absolutely not for everyone (especially if you don’t have the need for lots of complicated research and organizational hooks), but if you struggle to ﬁnd a writing environment that maps to the way your own writing brain operates, I still highly recommend checking out the free Scrivener download.

”NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"