Two Great Distraction-Free Writing Apps For iPad

31.05.2011
If you have an external keyboard for your iPad, you already have most of what you need for a solid experience. The iPad's windowless interface offers few background bobbles to break your concentration (except for push notifications, of course). So in that sense, pretty much any text editing app will do a passable job as a distraction-free word processor. But if you're looking for something designed to make writing on the iPad as simple and focus-enhancing as possible, Clean Writer and OmmWriter demand a closer look.

One of the best bargains in iPad-based text editing is , a $2 app that offers a clean writing interface with Dropbox integration. I wrote about this one back in March as one of my .

Clean Writer is fairly free of frills, but that's kind of the point. The Settings menu is small and simple, letting you choose between three color-schemes and three fonts, and giving you the ability to increase or reduce the font size and margin width. You can also turn auto-correction on or off, and that's the end of the options.

In daylight, I like Clean Writer's simple black-on-white color scheme, but at night it's nice to reverse it to white-on-black. There's also a green-on-black mode for those who like a retro vibe, and this one also does well in low light. In daylight, however, the iPad's high-glare screen makes the green text hard to see.