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Slate Magazine on the market for "Zenware"

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.

Brandon_Leedy's picture

Sometimes "zen" can be direct

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!)! :)

 
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