-I agree, this is a great program. I can’t really tell how much I’ve written, which makes me write longer. And the light red on black that I made it is just perfect.
-DarkRoom doesn’t let you use bold or italic fonts. You can pick them in the font selection dialog, but DarkRoom always uses the regular weight. huh. that would matter for me.
-This Dark Room application is severely pissing me off, and I’m baffled as to how useless the Help button is. All I’m trying to do is find out what the four buttons on the right side do. But considering that they aren’t labeled, and whenever I click on them (with text highlighted, mind you), they do nothing, I can’t exactly find out now can I? I was not indignant like this, and I figured it out pretty quick, but this was my qstn also: what are those arrows? and I clicked on Help and found only a little info, link to the website. but I kind of like that.
-YaddaYah, The four arrow buttons scroll the text. The thin ones scroll line by line, the fat/bold ones scroll page by page.
[introducing] Dark Room 21 June 2006« they.misled.us :
A few posts ago, I was talking about a pretty slick piece of productivity software named, WriteRoom. I have to admit that I had been using it quite a bit to accomplish quick burst writing. Unfortunately, a couple days ago I was forced to use Windows while I was working on some homework for Managerial Operations. I scoured the internet looking for a similar application for Windows only to find nothing.
The program itself is so simple; it is amazing that nothing like it exists. Actually, as far as fullscreen text editing is concerned, practically nothing exists. Granted, you can use Word and OpenOffice Writer to do a fullscreen mode that is somewhat similar, but the problem with those is that you are forced to use the traditional black on white, which is still pretty hard on the eyes. huh: Word does not let you change the background & text colors? I think I recall switching to, hmmm, white on blue, I think. that might have been the only alternative. either black-on-white or white-on-blue. I like both okay. and green-on-black is cool. I don't know what I like best.
I know there are any number of unpleasant fullscreen command line style text editors that are available, such as vim, emacs, etc… But, the problem with those is (from my perspective) that the text fills the entire screen. Now, trying to scan back and forth across the entire screen is a rather difficult and straining endeavor. Thus, one of the simple beauties of WriteBoard, it has a nice column in the center that you determine the width ofI have decided to make the application available to the world for download; however I am not releasing the source code, because I do not want to step on the developer’s of WriteRoom’s toes. okay.
. right I figured this out. did not like how narrow the column was by default...
The bottom line is there is nothing like it for Windows. Or, I should more accurately say, there WAS nothing like it. I spent a couple hours yesterday, and a few minutes today developing an application that accomplishes the same thing. In fact, I am using it right now to type up this post and it is wonderful. So, please use it and let me know what you think. There are definitely a few things that I am working on to make it the most pleasant experience possible. Perhaps the most nagging problem is the fact that I am not aware of a way to change the color of the scrollbar, so no matter what color combination you select, it is still the default color. hmm always green? he's probably changed that by now. but my qstn is still, why a scroll bar? why not allow click & drag scrolling? I might just have to break down and write my own control.
132 Comments so far
-DarkRoom is fantastic. I am a journalist and author and this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. The scroll bar colour huh the colour is the only problem as far as I’m concerned. Hopefully there’ll be a new version soon.
-Fantastic friggin’ app. Just fantastic. I second (third? fourth?) the scroll bar change. seems to mean just the color? Other than that, make no changes. It’s perfect.
-I’d love to see the scrollbar hidden entirely. Let me rely on PgUp and PgDn to navigate through my text… like I used to in days of yore.
-There’s only one thing I am missing: a scrollbar. Without a scrollbar I have no idea about how long the text I am writing or reading is. Would love to see a minimalistic scrollbar - perhaps a shaded box would do it. Or did I miss something?
-The look and feel is perfect. And working in pure text is just what I need.
-It iss just _too_ cool not having any interface distractions whatsoever. No menu bar. No branded thingee icon. No toolbars. No status bar. No sidebars. No BS. Beauty. The bright gray scrollbar does mar the experience; it is great that that will be looked at in the next version! The ability to synch the scrollbar color with the bg will about do . . . the app will have reached perfection. If I’m feeling funky, I go orange on the font color. If I’m missing the old Wordperfect days, I go blue in the background and all yellow for text. Tks for writing it. I love Dark room.
-Nice app, but you can achieve a similar thing by simply changing the background in Word to Black (Format > Background), then changing the font color to green you can do this? and then View > Full Screen. You retain all of the word keyboard commands and abilities, without all the annoying screen clutter of Word.
-Don’t forget, to run this programme you need to download the .Net platform from the Microsoft website first.
-You seriously install .NET in order to install a program that makes your computer look like an old IBM AT? Sheesh, how productive. what's bad about.Net?
-The .NET requirement is because of the language he chose to write the software in. It’s fundamental to it working, much like the app it’s modeled on requires a Mac. This is a .NET app, which is a platform like Cocoa on Max OS X. It’s also what enabled him to whip this up in a matter of a few hours. Getting rid of the requirement would require rewriting from scratch.
-Also, does the .NET framework add any overhead? I.e. is it another ms product that loads some junk in the background whether you’re going to use it that day or not, and gradually gums up your whole machine? Caujse I want to use this program, but am leery of just wuickly installing some ms thing.
-----Jeff said: Regarding .NET Fears - I just use .NET because I can quickly develop in it. Just make sure you have the latest version and most of the problems should go away. It’s free, hopefully you just have enough bandwidth to download it :wink:. I do not think that it adds a whole lot of overhead, but I am not an expert on it.
-OpenOffice.org users: simply press Ctrl-J, need no more…
-Hey, awesome app! I’ve been working with a guy called Dan Ferrante (when I say working I mean user testing and offering comments, he’s doing all the coding) on a Windows version of Khoi Vinh’s Blockwriter. It’s quite similar to this, though less of the old school 1983 screen look. And it incorporates Vinh’s ideas to compel forward momentum in writing, e.g. strikeout text when you try to delete. hmmm? discourage you from going over & over a passage? by strikeout instead of disappear? ?? Look out for a beta version fairly soon!
-a really cool option in this program would be to disable the “backspace” key and the arrows. For me, often when I’m writing, I get into an “edit-as-I-write” mode that’s both slow and harmful to my creativity. I’d love to be able to force myself to really use it like a typewriter. (Or perhaps instead of disabling the backspace, turn it into a strikeout key or something.) ah.
I had dlcs-mrked Subtraction page re Blockwriter z0605 item. (just now added z0710 & 'orginfo').
Subtraction: Blockwriter: Text Editing without the Editing
At its heart, Blockwriter is a crippled text editor. What makes it like a typewriter is that it regards every character you type into it as basically ‘committed’ and permanent.
Rather than allowing the flexibility of cost-free deletions and insertions — and the attendant temptation to continually massage text beyond usefulness — this application only allows you to continue typing forward. To remove a word you’ve already committed, you can use the back button to actually strike-out text — with x’s, dashes or any character you’d like. It’s as simple as it was on a manual typewriter: you’re just ‘physically’ creating a second character impression over an existing one.
This makes for a messy presentation, but I think it’s that messiness that will discourage people from wasting time on refinements and will encourage them to move on to the next idea. Of course, it will always be necessary, at some point, to get a clean output of the text without the strike-outs. For this, Blockwriter allows the option of printing a copy of the writing without the struck-out text, and the export feature will automatically omit the same in the RTF file that results.
NOTE this is not an actual product, just an ideaI’m no programmer and I’ll never get around to learning enough Cocoa skills to build Blockwriter for myself, I figured I’d just do what I know: throw together some mock-ups of the user interface to get my ideas across.
No comments:
Post a Comment