A little late on this, but Dark Room is the coolest tiny simple freeware app that I’ve seen in a while. Functionally, it’s more bare than Notepad. It doesn’t do anything but take text input and save it, but it’s the idea behind it that deserves merit. A writing tool that removes all distractions and just leaves nothing between the writer and the text.
Of course, such a distraction free environment is illusory. The whole of your music library and all those episodes of that TV show that you downloaded and the entirety of the internet is just an Alt+Tab away. But psychologically, Dark Room remains interesting and, hell, I managed to write more in that one application today than I have all month so something must be working.
A constant struggle.Of all those distractions, YouTube is likely the most time consuming. It is “Hinterland Who’s Who” spoofs and whatever the fuck this is and sports highlights showing the most ludicrous play in a hockey game in years (Video — funny enough, of the top eight most viewed sports videos for the day, seven involve that play) and music videos. It’s amazing that anything gets written at all.
You could take the Dark Room concept a step further by making it an OS, some simple standalone thing based on Linux that can only run off a Live CD. So you stick the disc in and boot up your machine, and if you want to goof off you have to go through the trouble of ejecting the disc and rebooting into your main OS.
To me the idea is something like, the more hoops one must jump through to skive off, the more guilt barriers one has to navigate… thus increasing the likelihood that you’ll just buckle down and get stuff done.
Neat little app though. I’d even ditch the preferences menu option, just because certain kinds of people tend to fiddle with that stuff when their mind wanders. Config via XML or a separate app tends to encourage “get your settings right and never fiddle with them again”.