Writer: A free new web-app for composing text online

For you writers out there, I wanted to post a brief review of a free new web application called, oddly enough, “Writer.” Writer is a web-based text editor designed to simplify the act of writing by focusing you on the task at hand. It’s pretty much a blank black square that you fill with words. If you’re like me, the day has enough distractions; there shouldn’t be a need to add to them hunting for formatting options within your “mondo-lithic” word processor.

Writer strips away all the cruft and gets you focused on the content. It has two “keyboard shortcuts” for you emacs fans: (ctrl+s) for save and (ctrl+n) for new. Think you can handle that, genius? If you can’t, there are some smallish, subdued links at the bottom of the browser window to help you do the same thing.

My favorite feature of the processor is the subtle way in which it focuses your eye on the text. As you type, the words in the area you are working are slightly more bold than the words you wrote a bit further up the page. As somebody who is a horrible typist, hunting and pecking along the keyboard at all times, every time I snap my head up to the screen, I see exactly where I am at, sharply delineated.

The other thing I just love about this little application is the “blog it” feature. I’ve been experimenting with many free options for writing content and exporting it to my blog (a custom-hosted wordpress blog). Due to its simplicity, this app is now the de facto standard for writing posts. When I am done writing the content of my post, I click “blog it,” enter the admin details for my wordpress account, and the content gets uploaded as a draft post to my dashboard. Nice! I love how even this is not over-complicated. The author of the app, a “developer for hire” by the name of John Watson has realized that his app is not a “fully integrated blog-posting solution” and instead just focused on helping you move the content to a place where you can add those last-minute html flourishes.

Signing up for an account is optional and only necessary if you intend to “save” files and access them from multiple computers. It’s about as easy as it gets, you just supply a unique username and password.

If you’re a blogger, student, or someone who writes fairly short snippets of text, anything other than a novel really, I’d recommend giving writer a try. There’s really no reason not to, considering the insanely low switching cost.