Sunday, May 3, 2015

Calmly Writer for ChromeOS Review














by Tony Thomas

Calmly Writer is an immersive writing environment for Chrome with a strange name. It even works off line on the Chromebook since it is a standalone Chrome app. (Yea!) It is the only Chrome app that I paid money for ($2.99) and it is well worth the price, in my opinion.

Features include the ability to save files Plain Text, HMTL, Markdown, or a proprietary Calmly file. You can also open all of those file formats plus Microsoft Word DOCX. It also includes minimal formatting features like three levels of headers, bold, italic, links, curly quotes and numbered and bulleted lists. It also has the ability to print documents plus you can insert pictures.

Missing is the ability to precisely set margins, indents or center text. That is fair because it is not meant to replace a word processor or DTP program. It is an app that focuses on creating text, not formatting it.

Its full screen mode makes everything go away but your text (true immersion), focus mode blurs everything but the paragraph you are working on, and dark mode reverses the text. Other preferences include the ability to set narrow, wide or medium text width, select between two fonts (I would love to have more), change font size (three options), add space between paragraphs, and enable smart punctuation.

As a writer, I also like the fact that it shows word count, character count and reading time in the options side bar. I look forward to continued development of this app and hope it signals a trend towards more powerful and capable Chrome apps in the future.

For more information: http://calmlywriter.com/


Free online version: http://calmlywriter.com/online/