Darkroom

Doshdosh explains it simply:

“It’s called Dark Room and its a minimalist fullscreen word processor which forces you to focus on the writing process and nothing else.”

Turning your screen into a 1970′s ”glass typewriter” does indeed improve concentration.  The pace and density of personal multi-tasking across desktop and mobile platforms is bound to cause some reflection and backlash, driven not by tech-nostalgia but by genuine need of a respite.  The illusion that your computer is doing only one thing helps you to do the same, and we find that it feels nice.   On the hypermodern end of the timeline, today’s electronic communications are compact, and tend to be free of the need to emulate printed media.  Fonts and margins don’t mean much in a Tweet or an email, and the WYSIWYG document metaphor our dual-cores strain to run realtime begins finally to wear on us when we’re feeling task-oriented.   Our post about computers as language machines sympathizes with Darkroom’s focus on words as enough, maybe because people are language machines themselves.  Buttons and menus are “easier than remembering and typing commands” but move us away from the use of language, so maybe Darkroom is a step forward more than it is backward.

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