Mark Pilgrim sounds off about full screen “writing-focussed” text editors:
Reading the change logs of these programs is like traveling back in time. Way back. Latest changes in JDarkRoom 8: Undo / Redo. Seriously. Version 8, and they now support undo. No offense, but what the fuck?
He makes a good point. Does the world need yet another Text Editor?
Probably not.
But WriteRoom did the write thing and popularised full screen writers recently. The other apps (Darkroom, jDarkroom, whatever) are just trying to emulate this success on other platforms.
Who’s to say the “next great thing” for Text Editors has been done yet? I like the idea of WriteRoom but I’m now ooking for a different development platform – a cross between a good text editor, with IM support, collaborative editing and version control all built in. Sort of like iChat mixed with subEthaEdit. And if it can do a CoreAnimation fade of my background so I can see what’s going on while working, then all the better.
I would have to say that I don’t agree with Mark on this one. Yes, its a fad but it’s one that was probably needed.
He was one of the people at the front of the banner charge against Mac OS X and Apple a few months ago which ended up looking a bit like when the International Pippin Society rioted outside Apple HQ.
Steve Jobs:There’s three guys having some sort of fit in the parking lot. Can we call security? Or film them for the next iPod advert?
Bambi:Cameras on the way…
Go figure. I don’t know why he’s bothered, none of these apps run on Ubuntu anyway.
JDarkRoom is supposed to be a java thingy. Ubuntu still does not run java apps? Wow, I figured even those eedeeots would have figured out how to make that work by now.
I’ve had at least two reports of JDarkRoom running successfully on Ubuntu. Full screen mode was not supported properly on this platform until Java 6, so you may need to upgrade your JVM.