Grandview - Ready, Steady, Write

Ideas come and go, so capturing their essence on the spot is extremely important. Grandview is a basic text editor that allows you to enter its full screen mode via a simple keyboard shortcut,  that is available throughout your system.

Being creative is not an easy task, and even when you do get good ideas, you can easily be distracted by a new email, various notifications, ads and so on. Grandview is a small application that lives on your menu bar and provides a hot key that will launch a full screen writing window designed to shove a big foot in the outside world’s mouth.

In case you were wondering if Grandview can also take care of the sound, the answer is no. To have absolute silence (or, at least, as far as your environment is concerned), you will have to hit that mute button on your own. Otherwise, the music from your player, the sound of the video opened in your browser, or different audio notifications will be able to reach you.

When you use Grandview only to make quick notes, this is not an issue, but users that plan to use it as an “out-of-your-way” word processor might consider it a major oversight.

The Looks

Like any other menu bar application, Grandview makes its presence known through a small icon that offers quick access to its features. On the top of the menu, you will see your latest 10 entries, while on the bottom, you can access the Preferences and the Save/Open features (supports only TXT files).

The most important part, though, is the writing window, which can be launched using the default keyboard shortcut (Option + Command + 5). The window will cover your entire screen, but you can choose to see only the currently typed word, or enter the Whole Writing View (the shortcut is Option + Command + 4) and see the entire text.

Either way, you will be able to reach a clean space where you can express yourself without being too concerned about appearance or editing. Grandview allows you to put down your ideas in raw form and worry about “technicalities” later on.

The Works

The actual use of the application is quite straightforward and I doubt anyone needs directions. On the same note, the Preferences window offers several customization options that will prove very useful.

First of all, you get to change the default hot keys for entering the Writing Window, the Whole Writing View and the one that allows you to toggle between views (the default shortcut for that is Command + =). If you are not a fan of the combinations used by the developer, you can easily set your own.

Also, if you do not like having too remember so many things, you can check the “Mouse move activates Whole Writing View” and you are set. Knowing how to switch between writing modes is important because, the first time you launch the Grandview window, it will use the “one word at a time” view by default.

This is the concept around which Grandview has been developed in an attempt to bring back that “writer in front of an empty sheet of paper” feeling. I agree that it is suitable for certain situations, but I like being able to view my work as a whole.

Either way, Grandview keeps your last choice, but only throughout the session, not after a restart, so you will need to remember how to toggle between the two views, just in case.

There is a third writing mode, the Sentence view, which is activated by punctuation (to be exact, the presence of a full stop sign). Note that Grandview does not dissociate between a full stop and ellipsis, so certain sentences cannot be displayed properly.

Obviously, you can change the background color and font style, color and size to match your own taste, and specify if you want a blinking cursor, but you can also adjust the margins for both Word View and Whole Writing View modes. I appreciate the fact that, in the last case, you get a real time preview while sliding the buttons, so you don’t have to guess when to stop.

Grandview supports multiple screens, which means that you get to choose the one that will display the Writing Window. Furthermore, you can have a clean window on activation, have the content of the most recently closed window automatically saved on your clipboard, or have the application running on system startup.

I believe that checking the “No reverse” box should make you unable to modify the text you have written so far but, for some reason, it did not work for me. Unfortunately, the application does not contain a Help section, and the developer’s Support website does not provide exact directions on this matter.

My favorite option is the “Center on Horizon Mode,” which will keep the writing line on the center of the screen. True, half the screen will remain unusable, but it intrigues me how it seems to eliminate the notion of finality.

Grandview will keep a record of your 10 most recent documents in its main menu, while automatically creating TXT files for each entry in your Documents folder (look for the GrandviewLibrary). The name of the files will be generated using the following pattern: the first 12 characters contained in the file, the date and the time. This way, even if the item disappears from the list, replaced by a more recent entry, you can quickly find older sessions.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth