In trying to describe it over the past couple of days I keep finding myself referring to it as ‘not an iPhone’. Though it shares many of the same features and capabilities of its iOS brethren, it doesn’t follow the lead in OS design. The overall feel of the UI is very fluid. Screen transitions both in the OS and within many if the applications are smooth and scrollong through long lists of data or

The main screen of the WP7 interface is the set of configurable ‘Live Tiles’. These are in essence large icons which can also be updated by the apps they belong to. Messaging and email applications, for example, display the number of new message and the Marketplace app shows the number of apps you have which are waiting for an update.

The second panel on the main screen is the application list. All of the applications are displayed on a single scrollable list. This alone is a break with the now traditional layout of iOS and Android devices displaying screens and screens if icons. This difference provides an instant differentiation for the new Windows devices.

The one class of applications that is treated differently is games. Games are all listed from within the XBox Live hub isolating them a bit from the rest of the applications.

In the last sentence I mentioned a hub. This is the second major concept that the OS introduces. The hubs are, for want of a better term, points of convergence that bring together disparate sources of similar information. The best and most cited sample of this is the ‘peope hub’. the people hub allows you to merge in your contacts from your (multiple) email accounts and join it to contact information in your MSN messenger account and even your Facebook friends. The people hub uses all of that information to create a single list of contacts each of which contains information from the various sources.

The convergence of the people hub is nice. I’ll be happier once the OS can expand beyond Facebook and Windows Live to incorporate the services I actually use on a regular basis like Twitter, GoogleTalk, Tumblr and Flickr.

So far so good for the newest mobile OS. I’ll have more posts coming in the next few weeks getting into some of these features in more detail, covering other aspects of the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem, and hopefully touching on the developer story for WP7.

1Password

1Password is a password manager for MacOS X which late last year released a version of their application which works with the iPhone and iPod touch.  Both the desktop and handheld versions of the application are brilliant and provide a great credential management service for those running the appropriate devices.  If you’re a slider like many of us are starting to become, it may not be the solution for you since there’s no version of 1Password available for Windows or any flavour of Linux.

Website | App store | Twitter

Crayon Physics

Again coming from desktop-based roots Crayon Physics is a simplistic looking game for the iPod Touch.  The goal is simple, draw the tools you need to get the ball to the goal.  The trick is you need to be able to anticipate how those tools will react to gravity, friction and impacts with other objects.  Give Crayon Physics a try if you want a game that’s challenging enough to make you think, but easy enough to actually complete.

Note: the desktop version was licensed by Kloonigames to Hudson Soft, so they’re technically not related.

Website | App store

iShoot

iShoot is a great replication of games that were super-popular in the early 1990s like Worms and my favourite Scorched Earth.  Battle it out with the computer or up to three other human players in a tank-on-tank-on-tank-on-tank battle with weird and wonderful weapons of all kinds.  A recent release of the game also includes the ability to define your own rules, terrains and weapons making it a truly personalized experience.

Website | App store | Twitter

SpaceTrader

Modelled after games with the same name on other platforms, and of course loosely based on Wing Commander: Privateer, SpaceTrader allows you to fly from planet to planet as a trader in an effort to make as much money as possible.  This game is the only 3D entry on the list with a fairly rich 3D environment that you can walk around and explore.  I had some memory issues with this game early on, but working with the developer and sending in some crash logs a newer release seems to have licked that problem.  Give this a try as a neat alternative to the 2D side scrollers.

Website | App store

Which applications have you purchased?  Or are you more of a JailBreak type?  Party in the comments…

It’s been a great three weeks testing out the Flip. I’ve really enjoyed playing with the phone and getting the chance to share the reviews. It’s been very interesting to read through the comments on the posts, as well as the posts done by the other reviewers. Overall, I think the first set of team-member product reviews has been pretty successful.

After looking over what I’ve already written and staring at the Flip sitting here in its box, I find myself pondering the question: “So what’s the bottom line?”

1. AMAZING screen. I don’t think I mentioned this before now, but the screen is bright, clear and great to look at.
2. Decent camera. The camera takes good pictures – for a phone.
3. AppWorld. It’s a great way to get things installed on the phone.
4. Applications. The bundled applications, along with the availability of decent applications make the BlackBerry a super-functional platform in any form factor.
5. Email. BlackBerrys are email devices, and always have been.

1. Keyboard. The lack of a QWERTY keyboard is the biggest issue I had with the phone. Talking to people who have been long-time Pearl users, the keyboard does certainly get easier to use the longer you have it. But with my usage (need to key in Twitter usernames, login IDs for websites and lots of strange email addresses) the SureType system isn’t.
2. Battery Life. The battery life was passable, but for something that is notably thicker than many other phones on the market the battery should be spectacular.
3. Casing. I understand that the Flip is geared as a ‘Consumer’ phone, and isn’t targeted at higher-end customers, but the casing feels cheap – a sentiment shared by a large number of people that came by my desk to check out the phone.

The phone is a pretty good entry-level BlackBerry, but the lack of a good keyboard and the overall form factor aren’t for me. Given the choice I’d stick with my Curve.

Since I wasn’t overly impressed with the email functionality built-in to the Flip’s mail program, when it came to Gmail integration at least, I thought I’d come back and talk about something quite a bit more cheerful: running applications on the Flip. The newer operating system on the Flip has a new application gallery called the BlackBerry AppWorld. The AppWorld, at the time of this post, has over 260 applications ranging in price from free through about $50… at least that’s the most expensive one that I saw.

The installation and setup experience is quick and easy. I was able to find several interesting apps to help me through my final week with the Flip. I had the opportunity to play with a number of different apps and explore some functionality that I hadn’t tried on my other BlackBerry.

• Google search app for speedier searching
• WeatherEye to see if the weather guys are right or not (from the Weather Network)
• Snap2Twitter to take photos and tweet them to the world using Snap My Life
• TankAce 1944 Lite to kill some time waiting for the doctor
• HockeyNews to keep track of my Canucks when I can’t find a TV

Having access to the BlackBerry AppWorld is a great step forward from previous methods of getting apps on the BlackBerry. They’ve made great strides in usability and ease of installation, and the new method is similar to the experience on the iPhone , with one major caveat – the number of available applications. The BlackBerry OS is not a new platform for developers, but it hasn’t gained the same following with application developers as Apple’s rival platform.

In addition to downloading from the application store, I’ve also installed the Gmail application from Google. This provides a more seamless experience than trying to use the built-in mail settings as it takes advantage of Gmail’s secure IMAP protocol to exchange messages with the server. This helps to keep the mail on the BlackBerry synchronized with the mail on the server including whether or not messages have been read. IMAP compatibility is something that I’d really like to see RIM implement in future revisions of the BlackBerry OS.

Marketing and Markets Both Windows and Mac enthusiasts love to evangelize about their platform of choice.  It’s human nature, we all want people to know how smart we are for choosing the best of what’s available.

As is often the case with most of these “holy wars” the smaller market tends to be more vocal, and more likely to point out all the flaws in its larger competitor.  This is certainly the case with the Apple community.  From the endless stream of “Get a Mac” ads and their YouTube parody counterparts to news releases and security firms touting the reduced target area of not running Windows, those who have and love Macs are always there to tell you that the solution to every problem with MS Windows is to simply get a mac.

And it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t provided a great deal of ammo for the pundits to use in their PR-muskets.  From the troubled launch of Windows Vista to the sad state of what is the Zune to the rather pathetic I’m a PC ad campaign Apple has certainly made up ground on the Redmond-based software giant.  Since 2001, Apple has nearly tripled their market share.  That’s a very significant jump for any company.  But let’s be realistic about what that really means.  The Mac maker has raised its market share from about 3.5% to somewhere around the 10% mark.  Even with Apple’s huge growth over the past 8 years, nine out of every 10 computers sold is running a version of Microsoft Windows.

As a result, Microsoft for their part shrugs off the attacks of the all things “i” maker, often ignoring the marketing onslaught and focusing on its target market: the Enterprise.  Does anyone remember when Apple launched the 3G iPhone, App Store and support for Enterprise features on the iPhone?  Apple certainly hasn’t made great strides into the corporate handheld market, which is something the Microsoft does better, but that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry does extremely well — but that’s a topic for another post.  Microsoft and Apple both make products which can be used in the business markets.  But time after time, companies are continuing to choose the Microsoft platform over that of Apple, a huge percentage of the 90% that Microsoft controls in the operating systems space is thanks to the purchases of large companies.  If one were to examine only consumer purchases of computers, Apple would fare much better, probably somewhere around the 20% mark in parts of the world.

The consumer market is without question Apple’s strongest.  By developing a series of technologies and services that all work well together, it’s quite possible to change over your entire home to run on Apple technology.  From beautifully designed iMacs that can sit proudly in your living room, to powerful Mac Pros that can serve content for the entire household, to AppleTV which can sit atop your HD digital cable box and serve as an all-in-one media centre, to the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule backup consoles to manage your network and keep everything interconnected.  Add to that Apple’s iTunes and Mobile Me services and you’ve got an entire suite of hardware and software that talks to each other almost flawlessly, and really does make your day-to-day computing experience much smoother.  There’s only one catch, the Apple Tax.

The Apple Tax is what those outside the Apple community call the difference between the price of a Mac, and the price of the most closely aligned (in hardware specs at least) PC.  Often times the difference between a Mac and a PC comes in between 20% and 40%, with the Macs invariably being the more expensive machines.  PC enthusiasts will shame people for wasting their money on “pretty hardware” while the Mac community talks about security, ease of use and bundled software.  Over the past three years or so I’ve come to realize that the reason this debate won’t die is that they’re all right.

My Mac Experience

When I first picked up my Macbook one of the things that excited me about the experience was the new-ness of it.  This was a computing platform that I wasn’t particularly familiar with, and since I considered myself to be something of a technology afficionado I figured I should jump in and see what all the fuss was really about.

Within hours I had posted my first blog post and was happily exploring the features of OS X Tiger.  There were a few quirks of the Mac OS that drove (drive) me nuts but overall it was a pretty good experience.  Much more polished than other Windows alternatives (RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora) that I’d looked at in the past.  One of the strongest points in the Mac’s favour early on was the Unix-style BSD-based terminal.  This is where, for me at least, some of the magic of OS X came into play.

I’ve always been a command-line geek.  There’s no question in my mind that computers function at their best when they don’t need to worry about drawing a “pretty picture” for us lazy humans.  Command-line applications (and for that matter services/daemons) run better, and more often than not, more reliably than applications with elegant user-interfaces.  Being able to explore the world of the UNIX/Linux command line on my shiny new Mac was indeed a revelation for me.  It even led to me porting the wget application to run on Mac OS X.  This wasn’t something that I’d ever consider trying to do for Windows, though it probably isn’t much more difficult.

As time moved forward I really enjoyed my MacBook. Adding new applications to the computer was as simple as downloading them from the Internet and in most cases dragging the application to the Applications folder.  In other cases I would need to double-click an .mpkg file to run the installer.

But I noticed after a while that all the software I’d been downloading for my Mac Lab Rat segments for the old version of the podcast had really cluttered up my system.  Thankfully OS X allows you to clean up all of that mess from the installations with just the drag of a mouse.  Yep, that’s right. To uninstall an application from OS X, you just need to drag it to the trash can.  That’s much simpler than un-installing programs on Windows, right?  Well, that’s not really the whole truth.

First off, you need to understand how a Mac stores applications.  Each application is stored in a package ending with a .app extension.  This is, in reality, just a folder that contains the majority of the files that the application uses.  Dragging “the application” to the trash is really just a way of deleting the application folder.  But with many applications this doesn’t delete the entire application footprint.

There are two folders where applications store the majority of their extra files and these are the /Library and the /Users/<username>/Library folders.  Apple’s own recording application GarageBand stores over 1.5GB of files in these library folders, removing the application using the Drag-and-Drop method will leave those files on your computer.

Malware & Baddies There’s no question that anyone who buys a Mac today, or has bought one in the past 10 years has experienced but a fraction of a percentage of the malware, spyware, viruses and badness that Windows owners have to deal with on a regular basis.  Apple touts this fact when they promote their Macs as one would expect, and as they should. The lack of these problems on a Mac is a great reason to use the system.  Mac fanboys would have you believe that the Mac Operating System is fundamentally designed to be more secure. They talk about the fact that because you’re less likely to be infected by problems on a Mac, the Mac OS is orders of magnitude more secure than Windows.  But notice nowhere does it say that there are fewer vulnerabilities in OS X than in Windows.

The reality is that with Windows’ huge market share (remember the 90% number we talked about earlier?) they are the 10,000lb gorilla.  When your next biggest competitor makes up less than 10% of the market, it’s clear who will be the target. (For those in the business of building gorilla killin’ helicopters (malware), the real target is King Kong not Nim Chimpsky.)

If you’re writing malware of any kind, you’re typically doing it in one of two ways:

1. Target companies
2. Target the highest number of people possible

The majority of malware authors choose to go with option #2: cast a wide net and see how many fish you can catch.  If your net is set to catch Windows machines, the sheer math of it will get you more infected machines than if you were to target the much smaller Mac market.  That said, with success comes difficulty.  Mac users are starting to see pockets of activity targeting OS X.  Consider the Pwn to Own competitions that security companies have run for the past few years. Invariably, OS X has been compromised at each of them, and in most cases extremely quickly. Modern operating systems are all susceptible to exploits and security holes. Even linux systems are vulnerable to attacks, they simply have the benefit of a large number of people to quickly patch holes and a user community generally less susceptible to getting themselves infected.  OS X is not an invulnerable operating system.

Software – Included and Excluded

It’s often touted that the software included on Mac Systems helps to justify the increased price tag of purchasing these machines. It does help, to be sure. The quality of the included software is quite high, and allows you to manage photos, music & email, make videos, burn movies, and record audio.  What Apple doesn’t want you to know is that there are lots of applications out there for Windows too, some of which may even be bundled with your system when you buy it.  Consistency is Apple’s strongest point. They can use phrases like “iLife comes with every new Mac”.

I’ve used every application that comes with iLife at least once.  The most frequently used applications being iPhoto and GarageBand; unfortunately I’ve not been overly satisfied with either and the only reason I stuck with them is that they were for all intents and purposes free applications.  iPhoto in particular lacked a number of features, the most obvious of which is the ability to organize images into folder hierarchies.  This has been fixed in the latest version, but I don’t feel like paying $69 for something that free apps like Picasa can do for free.

GarageBand has worked out quite well for the most part, but does leave a few things to be desired.  The interface is excellent, making creating podcasts and other recorded audio quick and fairly intuitive.  It becomes obvious fairly quickly though that this product too is targeted at a consumer audience as there are a number of audio manipulation features missing including fine grain control over cutting and pasting audio, and the application crashes with my podcast files once it gets over an hour in length.

While the iLife suite is touted as being partial justification of the increased cost of the Macs, in many cases I’ve abandoned these applications in favour of free applications that I was able to download from the Internet.  I’m in the midst of replacing iPhoto with Picasa and GarageBand with Audacity (which admittedly is missing a bunch of features too, so I’ll probably have to use both).

Coming from a Windows world, I was accustomed to being able to find software online that did what I needed my computer to do, and the vast majority of the time not having to pay for it — and let me be clear, I’m talking SourceForge, not PirateBay.  What I found in coming to the Mac world is that commercial ISVs (independent software vendors) were far more common for home-use applications on the Mac than for Windows.  Translation: If you want it, be prepared to pay for it.  Third-party developers have done a great job of writing software that has a Mac look & feel.  Apple and Microsoft both publish guidelines on best practices for developing software for their respective platforms.  The ISVs that publish software for the Mac do a great job of creating a quality product the only catch of course being that you need to buy the apps.  There is open-source software available on the Mac, but as with the malware developers. the open-source community prefers to stick to platforms where they can get the most eyeballs on their product.

Getting Things Done This is far and away the most subjective category in my review.  There is no question that I’ve been extremely productive with my MacBook over the past three years.  I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, contributed to my online forums, remotely managed software on my websites, handled email, instant messaging, twitter, virtualization and managed my online life.  The thing is, most of the time I’m not using a Mac specific application to do those tasks.  All of my Internet activity is done using FireFox rather than Apple’s own Safari browser.  The main reason for that is that I find Safari to be a bit clumsy to use, and above all else, I miss the ability to download tons of free plugins and extensions for the browser that make my online life better.

One task where the Mac has a leg up on Windows, conceptually at least, is the fact that it’s built-in command-line interface is based on BSD.  This means that all of the default tools for handling command-line operations in a Unix environment are already present, and the most important of those for me is SSH.  Native command-line support of SSH makes administering my web servers a more seamless task, and despite the fact that it’s command-line in nature, that may be the most Mac-like feature of my Macbook.  I can get this done on windows without much effort as well, but with the Mac, this truly was built-in from the get-go.

Re-Staging Systems I’m hard on my computers.  I always have been.  Every system I’ve ever owned prior to my MacBook has been re-staged or re-imaged about once per year.  Sometimes this was for OS upgrades, sometimes because it had become slow and unusable, and sometimes because I wanted to try a major configuration change to make the computer more useful to me.  Something that really appealed to me about the Mac from those I’d spoken to prior to purchasing it was the idea that all of this would be gone once I got a mac.  Never would I need to do the dreaded “wipe and reload” operation that I’d become used to in Windows.  The reality is, I’ve re-staged my Macbook about the same number of times (if not more) than I had originally done on Windows.

1. Bought a new Mac
2. Over the course of the first 6-8 months, downloaded every piece of Mac software I could find. Un-installing them left me with a clutter of junk in the “Library folder” for the dozens and dozens of apps I had removed. To clear this up permanently, I re-staged the computer.
3. About 6 months later, I wanted to try out the pre-release version of Boot-Camp that came with OS X 10.4.  Unfortunately after the previous re-installation I had chosen a “case-sensitive” file system — this doesn’t work well with Boot Camp.  I re-staged the computer.
4. When OS X 10.5 came out, I felt somewhat duty-bound to pick up the new release on it’s first day of RTM.  To put this on, I followed my policy with all OS updates (and the advice I had found online) which is to always start clean. I re-staged the computer.
5. I decided a few months later that I wanted to try dual-booting my computer with Windows and OS X 10.5, unfortunately I had filled up my 80 GB hard drive so much that the OS X couldn’t create a decent boot partition.  I re-staged the computer.
6. Several months later I bought a new 320 GB hard drive and promptly proceeded to load it into my Mac.  Since the Boot-camp thing wasn’t really working out anyway I decided this would be a great time to get a fresh start.  I re-staged the computer.

Over the 32 months since I’ve owned the Macbook, I’ve re-staged the machine five times.  That’s about once every 6 months give-or-take.  That’s a bit more often than my Windows machines annual re-load, but I figure two of them were due to my unfamiliarity with the Mac OS.  So three times in three years, I call that a draw.

Conclusion – Will my next computer be a Mac? After looking at my Mac experience objectively for a couple of months as I’ve written this article on and off, I’ve come to two undeniable truths about how the Mac fits in to my life.

1. The Mac is an outstanding computer, that does nearly everything that I’ve ever needed it to.
2. For me, it isn’t worth the 30-40% premium over a comparable Windows-based notebook.

I really do love my Macbook, and I’m going to find a way to keep it running and in active service until it simply becomes too expensive to maintain (read: need to replace the battery, or a system component out of warranty).  But I also know that my next machine, which will be a replacement for the desktops in my basement will most likely be an off-the-shelf PC.  The vast majority of what I do on my computer is done on the Internet.  The applications I use on my Mac every single day are Firefox, Thunderbird, MSN, TweetDeck, TextPad and the CLI SSH client.  All of those applications are available on every single computer that I’ve ever used.  So when I buy the next system, the only decision for me as far as operating systems go, will be whether I buy Windows, or install the latest LTS edition of Ubuntu.

I’ve been a BlackBerry user for the past 6 months or so, and before that I had used a couple of other Windows-based smart phones. The biggest difference that I noticed when I moved to the BlackBerry was that the device seemed to be designed around being a great email tool. All email functionality seemed to be very well thought out, and synchronization with my corporate TELUS email account was flawless.

With the Flip, I decided to point my Gmail account at the device in hopes of using it for my personal email, this is where I ran into my first major snag with the device: Email synchronization.

Up to this point, whenever I’d been using the BlackBerry email client, it was leveraging the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). BES is what allows the BlackBerry to securely interface with TELUS’ internal mail servers. Using BES email is perfectly synchronized and changes in my inbox show up on the BlackBerry in seconds.

With the Flip, I set up my Gmail account using the built-in wizard. Because the email client on the phone is the same as the one I was using on my Curve I expected everything to work the same way. It doesn’t. Because the link to Gmail is working over an older (and unencrypted I’d bet) POP3 connection there’s no way to synchronize the status of messages (whether they’ve been read, deleted, flagged etc). This causes all mail downloaded to the BlackBerry to essentially be a copy of what was in the inbox when the message was downloaded.

I’ll talk about another way to get your email working on the Flip (for Gmail at least) in my next post. But for now my email experience, for personal email at least, has been less than ideal.

It’s been just over a week since my adventures with the Pearl Flip began and it’s been a week of exploration, discovery, delight and occasional frustration. I wanted to talk a bit about the text-input system that the Pearl uses.

The BB Flip, like many other small-form-factor handsets has to overcome the challenge of allowing email and texting to work without requiring a full keyboard. Each of the keys has two letters on it and they can be used to enter text into the phone. The main advantage over most standard handsets is that the order of the letters follows a traditional QWERTY keyboard rather than the [ 2|abc ] [ 3|def ] buttons etc.

There are two different input methods, the first is a pretty traditional multi-tap method where you press a key either once or twice to get the first or second letter. The Pearl Flip and some other BB models also employ a predictive text-entry system that RIM calls SureType in place of the multi-tap system. This is similar to the T9 text-entry system that’s found on many other phone models by Motorola, Samsung and others.

My first few minutes with SureType were, to say the least, aggravating. It takes some time to realize that the predictive text continually re-analyzes what you type. Typing the word “super” for example, goes through the following “predictive guesses”. The bullets below represent the top choice on the list after each keypress:

• a
• au
• sip
• supe rmarket – (yes, this really was top of the list)
• super

The key with SureType is to keep typing and not let the predictive text fool you into thinking that the system is too dumb to figure out what you’re trying to say. As long as you stay away from Acronyms (particularly specialized acronyms) it does a pretty good job of selecting what you want.

SureType will also learn as you go, adding in words and phrases that you get it to enter. These aren’t easy to do (like usernames for email accounts) so it’s a good thing that it remembers them. Trying to type in “kdmurray” the first few times to test out my blog and Gmail was quite a feat.

SureType doesn’t work perfectly all the time and it seems to have some interesting word choices which certainly don’t seem intuitive at the time – that may simply be a case of context. It does however speed up typing compared to Multi-tap when it’s working the way we want it to (and you’re using boring normal words). I’ll talk more about the SureType in a later post once I’ve worked with it more fully for a while. For now, the jury’s still out.

I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid display stands that have the new flip on them so that I can channel all my first impressions to the blog. (It’s been tough for a gadget geek to avoid playing with the new toy…)

At first blush the package looks pretty much like every other PCS phone I’ve ever opened. Nice white box with TELUS’ signature future friendly brand.  Looking over the gear that ships in the box:

• Wall charger
• USB charging cable
• Stereo headset
• Obligatory ‘getting started’ manual
• Black (thank heaven) BlackBerry Pearl Flip

The unit itself is very light (likely due to it’s 90% plastic shell) and the screen is very clear and bright — much moreso than my Curve, and even my iPod Touch.  This was a bit surprising considering the size of the device.  It sounds like, from what I’ve been told, the previous generation BB Pearl also had a very clear screen.

The only downside I can see from the initial design is that RIM has not to use the widely available mini-USB plugs for the charging/sync cable that plugs into the phone, and have used a much less common micro-USB.  This means that if I forget the charger somewhere, the cable for my BB Curve (or my camera, USB hub, card reader etc.) won’t work with the Flip.  This is the only blemish on an otherwise stellar first day.

I’m looking forward to exploring the device, the SureType text-entry system and other bits and pieces over the next few weeks.  I’ve already got email and instant messaging set up.  Maybe I’ll even use it as a phone one of these days.

Transparency statement: This post is part of a series of blog posts that I’m doing internally for work, being re-published on my main blog. The handset is on-loan to me for a three week period, and I’m not being compensated for writing the reviews.

In the interests of transparency I’ll say that I’m being provided with a test unit for the three weeks that I’ll be putting up posts, but I’m not being paid for them.

So keep your eyes peeled for my adventures with a the Blackberry Pearl flip!

Write or Die provides you motivation to write not based on the positive reinforcement of a job well done but on the fear of a web-based application inflicting consequences upon you.  Write or Die offers varying levels of “difficulty” from forgiving through to evil, and three types of consequences.

• Gentle mode provides a polite pop-up reminder to keep writing
• Normal mode plays REALLY awful music/sounds in the background
• Kamikaze mode will begin deleting one word per second while you’re delinquent

The fear of having one’s work deleted is a serious motivator to keep writing.

If you’ve got a writing project to do whether it’s a paper for school like me, or you’re participating in a novel-writing event (WoD was originally built for authors participating in NanNoWriMo) give Write or Die a try.