On Nov 5, 2005, at 5:16 PM, Benjamin Jackson wrote:
It's about minimizing distractions. There's a significant mode switch that's triggered when all of a sudden the only thing you should be doing is the only thing you can see on the screen. No bouncing dock icons, no flashing news reader, no growl notifications, just your words staring you in the face. It kind of reminds me of the good old days of green screens and ascii text.
Definitely. I use emacs with ratpoison and X11 when I really need to focus, and there's a distinct productivity increase when I do. Of course, since I've discovered TextMate, I do that a lot less because TextMate is more fun.
One problem with full-screen apps on the Mac is the fact that good Cocoa interfaces don't lend themselves to a full-screen environment. Ulysses is a good example. It works full-screen because its interface is a single monolithic window, but that makes it look like hell when it has to share a desktop with other apps. A full screen TextMate would require either a significant interface change or a loss of functionality, and I don't know that I'd really want either of those.
-dudley