Why did I start working on my own app?

Hey,

Okay, first things first. I have my side project., it’s a distraction-free editor working as a browser extension, called Difree.

To be honest, there are hundreds of different text editors available on the market. Why did I bother to create yet another text editor?

Why Gmail / Google Docs was not enough?

Well. It started a couple of years ago, when I noticed I hated writing e-mails in Gmail.

1. The font was ugly and too small to me.
2. The editor, by default, was located in the bottom-right corner of the site, which made me moving my eyeballs diagonally.
3. The formatting was clumsy and hard to navigate.

What the heck? I liked writing. I didn’t have problems with putting my thoughts on paper / on digital screen. I found writing an excellent communication tool. What did the writing repel me?

It was the same. When I wanted to write a larger piece of text, e.g. a blog post, in Google Docs / Microsoft Word, I found it’s hard, too.

1. It looked overwhelming.
2. I found the formatting too complicated.
3. Coping and pasting to another place brought some problems, considering the formatting.

I couldn’t have focused on writing. “It’s not you, it’s me”. The troubleshooting should have started with me, not with the writing environment, right?

What about other writing apps?

So I started exploring external tools, such as Scrivener or iA Writer. That was a vast improvement, considering my writing environment.

Nevertheless, I wanted more, because I still saw some flaws. Mostly, I complained about the speed of the tools I mentioned. I couldn’t have fastly jotted a note.

BTW. isn’t it that strange? What good is a writing tool, when I cannot write comfortably there? What’s more, my work-around was that I wrote a piece externally, and then pasted it.

First steps and how does it look like now?

The option on the table was to create own writing tool. My friend and I started working on Difree in April 2021, and released the first version in July 2021.

Finally, I have got a tool, where I can write comfortably and with fewer distractions. I’m satisfied and proud of it. Difree has satisfied a group of people, too.

In our pace, we work on it, adding, changing, removing, and pivoting. But that’s another story, for another post.

Best, Olek

Written in Difree | Graphics thanks to #dalle