Writeroom the Mac App for writers and authors

WriteRoom mac app for writers

This is WriteRoom Mac I am using to write this article and right from the start I like the look of it. At the moment it is working well with Dragon Dictate. I am quite interested to see that it has optional session tracking and logging.

Using WriteRoom on OSX Lion

The text is easily readable, although it does seem that I can change the font if I wish and also change the size of the text. This Mac app for Writers is a fully Lion compatible application, that will do the full-screen thing and has autosave and auto resume. There are two versions of full screen, one where you can still see what is on a second monitor and the Lion standard mode which only shows the Linen effect on your second screen. Well done for that, there are a lot of us that have a second monitors. I like that in the title bar it tells me how many words have been written as I go. The word count moves to the bottom left corner when in full screen.

The Mac App for writers

It seems that there are quite a lot of new features in version 3.0 and I will have to take the time to go through all of the menus to see what there is available. One of the things that I like – that I have been using in Scrivener, is the way that I can have the line that I am working on highlighted. This little trick makes it easy to see exactly where I am writing on screen at any time. It is especially useful when I go back into the text, more so than when I am appending text to the end of what I have written already.

WriteRoom is a great looking app and it has themes too

WP Writeroom Mac App

In amongst the options you are able to decide where you want the text to wrap, choosing from numbers like 40, 50, 60, 66 up to 200 or you can go with wrapping to the full width of the window you are working on or wrapping to a page size. Which one you go with will depend on the size of the text you work with and the screen size you have on you computer. I like to have bigger text of 36 and wrap to 66 characters, like I said, the old eyes are grateful for such considerations.

RTF or Plain Text – Markdown and Marked

It is possible to have your work in RTF format, you might do that if you had to have different font sizes in the one document. If like me you work with Markdown then keeping it as plain text is best. The text is more portable that way. Also you can use the application from Brett Terpstra called Marked to show you a view of your work formatted from the Markdown syntax. Another useful mac app for writers.

Looking for Mac Apps for writers?

When you are looking for apps for Mac this is a brilliant app for Mac using, authors and writers. There are a lot of text editing apps for the Mac and for the writer Mac users, Writeroom is a marvellous choice for writers. The Mac App store is the first place I tend to look now when I want apps for Macs I own. The other popular writer app Mac based is Byword, although you might include in the apps Mac users like IAWriter. The app I like and would recommend is Writeroom. Looking for mac apps that will suit a writer or author then definitely look at this one.

 Useful writers tools

Marked and WriteRoomUPDATE

I got feedback from the developers about the not writing to the logging .csv file and now it is working.

  • The csv won’t be created or written to unless you’ve saved the file (via WriteRoom). Check that File menu > Record Sessions in Spreadsheet is enabled. You can manually start a new session entry with File menu > Begin New Session.
  • From a fresh launch of WriteRoom for Mac, try opening the file (drag-drop on to WriteRoom or the Open File dialog, doesn’t matter), make your edits, save, and check. I’ll look into this, we might have to better define what constitutes a ‘session’ in a future update.
  • You may need to repair your disk permissions (with Disk Utility.app). Under Lion, there have been issues with this sort of thing all over, preventing apps from writing their registration keys, allowing autosave in the (official) autosave directories, etc. It’s… awkward. Not sure, but this may be one of those cases.

The Mac App for writers.