There is some pretty innovative software showing up on the Mac these days. An app that caught my eye today is WriteRoom from Hog Bay Software. WriteRoom is a full-screen text editor with… nothing else. Just a blank screen and your text, no OS distractions. Excellent!
Alas, I use Windows and Linux, not MacOS. Fortunately, there is an easy way to imitate WriteRoom in Microsoft Word 2003 on WinXP. Just fire up Word, press Alt-V, then U, and voila, you're running Word in full-screen mode. As an added bonus, there is a special full-screen toolbar that you can customize or leave blank as you see fit. Interestingly, if I also open the options dialog and change the default Word color scheme to be white text on a blue background (a la the classic WordPerfect for DOS), I find it even easier to concentrate and write. Additionally, I mapped the F11 key to the View/ToggleFull function, which is the same key used for switching to and from full-screen mode in Internet Explorer and Opera [operaubuntufonts, opera, opera9, operastaticbin, opera-idstring, operamini41, linkstashbuttonsforoperawin764bit, badoperasites, operaminiusage, operamini4].
Funny that this feature has been in MS Word all along, but it took an innovative developer on the Mac to make me aware of it.
