As a professional writer, I am always on the lookout for new tools that can make my work easier or just more interesting.
Writer is one that happens to do both. If you’re the type of person that uses a word processor on a regular basis, you may occasionally long for the good old days when they were simple programs that didn’t get cluttered up with extra features like URL links and HTML formatting.
If so, you’re going to absolutely love Writer, a simple and nostalgic Chrome extension that brings the aroma of yesteryear to your word processing, and does it for free.
Since Writer installs as a Chrome app, it’s always ready at hand when my browser is open (which is only about 93.6% of the time my laptop is powered up) to jot notes, type letters, anything I could need a basic word processor for. Best of all, it does it with style that fits my own, and that’s worth it’s weight in bits and bytes.
Writer offers a number of features that make it worth using over a program like Notepad, for simple word processing. For example, Writer offers you the option to change the background color and the text color of the processing environment. Now, this might not seem like a big deal at first, unless you spend a lot of time typing. If you do, then you know the black text on white background can eventually tire and strain your eyes, so being able to change the colors is a great thing for anyone who spends more than a few minutes using the program. In addition to the color changes, Writer offers some other customizations like typewriter sound simulations and a blinking cursor (circa 1986) that is very nostalgic of the old monochromatic monitors so Matrix fans will drool over it. It’s even got a word count available for you any time you click the link at the bottom of the screen for that purpose.
Additionally, Writer offers you the option to create a login ID (not required for using Writer but is required for some features) for free, and then access your documents from anywhere, as they are saved under your user name. This alone is a major improvement over WordPad or Notepad, just because it allows access to cloud storage for your documents without fuss or muss. You’ll also be able to share your documents via a single click on the screen, through email or web sites like Tumblr and WordPress. Of course, you can also download your documents as text files or even as PDF files if you so choose, and print straight from the app as well.
While Writer doesn’t give you all those fancy shmancy options that the latest two-hundred dollar office program has, it does offer you a solid way to create and access text documents online at no cost and it does so in a fun and easy environment. You really can’t ask for more than that from a basic word processor, and Writer is polished to the point of being shiny. I really liked this one, and I can see myself using it for many things in the near and far futures. Until next time, my friends.
- Check out Writer here.
