Distraciton-Free Reading
There is one thing this blog takes for granted, and it is that computers are distracting. You cannot make them completely un-distracting without taking away features. What you can do is cover that all up for specific activities. This is the principle WriteRoom and the fullscreen modes in other applications work off.
To make a WriteRoom for reading, I combined the free apps Tofu and HotBox. The tip works best with Tofu’s Services menu item, particularly in Snow Leopard, and you have to launch the app to enable that. While you’re there, you can customize the font and colors in Preferences - mine is a dark brown on light tan, which looks better than it sounds. You also have to enable HotBox in its preference pane.
Once you have those on, whenever you want to read something distraction free you can select a bit of text, choose “View in Tofu…” from the contextual or Services menu, and you can read from there. If you’d like to sit back and read, you can activate HotBox and press space to get the window mode, then click Tofu’s window. It follows the settings for smoothing in System Preferences, which you can change easily with ⌥⌘\ (option-command-backslash).
A few more customizations you might want to make: Changing HotBox’s key combination and initial selection mode, and setting Tofu to also change the font of rich text and to not prompt to save.
(Submitted by )
Somewhat related to the previous post. This is a pretty neat tip and two apps I had never even heard of before.
Notes:
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