I've been playing around a bit with a very cool (and free) word processing ... nay, writing ... program called Ommwriter. They currently offer two versions. One is free, the other is cheap. It is available only for Mac, and you can get the paid version from Apple's App Store. The free version is available at the OmmWriter web site. To say this app is simple would not do it any justice, although it is pretty simple, as you can see if you watch their little introductory video:

Introducing OmmWriter D?na from herraizsoto&co on Vimeo.

The obvious focus of this software is creating a writing environment that is free from distraction. In my case, I have it set to display a completely blank screen, most of which is defined as writing space. Some quiet wind chimes play in the background as I type. The font is a simple, clean san-serif. And I have the key-click turned off, as the free keyboard sounds are pretty annoying. The pay version has a sound that is just like an IBM Selectric. Nice.

Ommwriter is not an ordinary word processor. There's no formatting, setting of indents, outdents, tables, image insertion, or any of a myriad of other things that we've come to expect from a program like Pages or Word. Ommwriter is about writing. The usual user interface is a blank screen (or background image) with a blinking cursor. No menus, no inspector windows. Nothing. As I mentioned, I have just a blank screen that looks like a piece of paper.

I am tempted to type, "It was a dark and stormy night..." It would look quite appropriate.

At any rate, if you are a writer, and you use a Mac, you may wish to look into this. Or not.