I never realised before just how distracting everything is. At all times there’s something else going on all around us whilst we’re trying to concentrate on our work or our thoughts. Take, for example, me writing on this blog. It’s not just me, my keyboard and my thoughts. No, I’m constantly wondering whether the formatting is ok, whether or not to correct that spelling mistake that’s being shown to me with the little red squiggly line, or where I should place the image so as to give the article a nice feel.

Should I really be thinking about those things whilst I’m writing? Shouldn’t I really be concentrating on the words and then sort these things out afterwards? Of course I should. And that’s where Ommwriter Dāna II comes in.

Ommwriter is a very basic text editor with a difference. It allows you to get back to the thing you should be focusing your mind on. It does this in a number of clever ways.

The first is that it completely takes over your Mac. It turns off the notifications before you start and fills the screen with your choice of a number of different backgrounds. These are all intended to be calm and soothing so as to make you look straight at the words you’re typing, whilst at the same time giving your eye a slight distraction so that it doesn’t get bored with a plain white backdrop.

Secondly it doesn’t clog the screen with any options whatsoever, though these are only a mouse-movement away. Give the mouse a tap and the menus appear to the side of what you’re writing, with just the right amount of choice; a couple of fonts (serif, sans serif and handwriting) and a few different sizes to choose from for those who need the larger text.

The third and final thing that sets this editor apart is that it plays soothing music to help you focus you mind. Now that might sound like a load of old tosh, but give it a go and I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised. And if you’re not? Well, just turn the music off and use the editor without. It’s still a rather good set-up and one which I’m hoping will allow me to concentrate on writing again, just like I used to.

Of course, you may well miss the things you’re not going to get on Ommwriter, such as the formatting and spellcheck. But that’s really not what this application is about. Once you’ve written your words you can save the document and open it again in a more fully-featured editor, or simply copy and paste what you’ve written into Microsoft Word or Pages.

Some of you may be thinking that the £2.99 price tag in the Mac App Store can hardly be justified given the lack of features this offers, but rest assured the app is more about what you don’t get than what you do. After writing this article on it as my first experiment I’m very pleased with the results. Try it out for yourself and get back to writing rather than editing.