Minimalist background images and subtle, ambient music aim to promote a state of mental relaxation and focus.Īs the desktop client recommends when you start it up, OmmWriter is best experienced with headphones. the emotion, intuition, and creativity) and connecting to that to build more meaningful products for people and, as a result, more successful ones.The experience of using OmmWriter isn’t just about the distractions it blocks out, but also what it adds.
What's not as well-documented is the "art" of product management (i.e. There is no shortage of posts about the "science" of product management (i.e. If it did go away, there would be a lesson to be learned somewhere in there. That said, a great product can’t survive without a sustainable business model, and OmmWriter’s “pay-what-you-can” pricing and non-subscription model makes it hard for their biggest fans to keep supporting the project. I hope they keep it going because it’s something special. They’re a design agency and OmmWriter was never their primary focus so it could just be on the backburner. It’s not clear if it’s still being actively worked on (I have an email out to herraizsoto, the company that makes it to ask). The last non-bug fix release of OmmWriter was 3 years ago. They understand the nature of a product speaks to the nature of the people who use it, and a deep understanding of one helps build the other. The best Product Managers understand the products we use are extensions of who we are and who we want to become. Most people don’t know who you are or who you’re becoming so product advice should be treated like life advice: something to consider but not follow blindly.Īpplying thousands year old Taoist principles to products might seem strange – of course a product is not a person – but we bring inanimate objects into our emotional lives all the time (from blankets and stuffed animals as children to cars and phones as adults). In product management as in life, people will have many opinions on what you should do. “Product advice should be treated like life advice: something to consider but not follow blindly” OmmWriter focused on the person writing, not the tool, and they connected with people on a deeper level. They talk about loving the serene backgrounds, meditative music, and gentle keyboard sound effects. Meanwhile, OmmWriter kept it’s original simplicity – no headings, no markdown, no links, no images, nothing – and found it’s “natural power.” When you read the comments from reviews and YouTube videos about OmmWriter you find unanimous praise. They’d become what they set out to change! Not only that, but they put themselves in the ring with those goliaths to fight in that weight class. This was in stark contrast with it’s peers which had added dozens of features and become closer to word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs. I re-downloaded it yesterday for the first time in 9 years and found it was nearly exactly how I remembered it! It was like returning to your childhood neighbourhood and seeing that everything you loved was still there. The app that brought this to mind is OmmWriter, a distraction-free writing app that was part of a Cambrian explosion of distraction-free writing apps in the late ’00’s. “It’s possible to make a product worse, even when trying to make it better.” After all, there are a million ways to build a product so we need to be thoughtful about it, not simply following the trends. Of course, there are business reasons to continue evolving a product but it’s a good idea to at least be aware of principles that have survived millennia. In a world of blitzscaling, continuous innovation, and an infinite march of new features, it’s hard to advocate for doing less. The principle of the Uncarved Block in Taoist tradition says that “things in their original simplicity contain their own natural power, power that is easily spoiled and lost when that simplicity is changed.”
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