Tag: DISTRACTIONS

It turns out people don't like clutter. Surprise! Not that YouTube's interface is all that cluttered, but sometimes I just want to watch my video without having to see it in full screen. Well, it turns out that there's a whole genre of websites which specialize in removing all the crud and leaving the video: in other words, they generate spartan pages with your video embedded right into them, on ...

I have a thing for full-screen editors. I also have a thing for Markdown syntax. I wanted to start writing some of my texts using Markdown in a text editor. Amazingly enough, I was not able to find a Win32 command-line implementation of Markdown. Well, WriteMonkey saved the day. That's just one of the features of this utterly incredible full-screen editor. It's got everything I need for writing, ...

The first thing you should know about AwayFind is that it's still in closed beta. That's important to know, because I think many of you would probably like to try it right now. It's a partial solution to one of the most irritating office problems: email overload. Like every tool, email can be used in a good or a bad way. Most of the stuff we get is distracting junk, but some emails are actually ...

Ommwriter is a Mac word processor with a bit of a gimmick. Like one of my favorite writing apps for the Mac, WriteRoom, Ommwriter goes full-screen, with a minimal interface and a focus on avoiding distractions. Ommwriter is even more extreme, though, adding a calming background and soothing music to the mix, and restricting your control over text formatting to a bare minimum to reduce fiddling. ...

SelfControl is a Mac app aimed at stopping you from indulging in online distractions while you're trying to get your work done. The way it goes about that is pretty extreme: it disables access to distracting sites of your choice, and all email servers, for a period of time you specify. Even restarting won't remove the block; you'll just have to wait for the time to run out. You can still use other ...