While researching this post, what really struck me was the sheer quantity of word processing applications, in a wide variety of flavours there are now. There’s full scale offices, word processors mini and maxi, text editors, online, offline, collaborative, private, chapter based, etc etc. Now I had to wonder, just who uses all these apps, and more importantly who decides to build them?

Of course, if you have been around a while, you will remember the office wars, when Microsoft and Wordperfect were duking it out to own the office desktop, at great cost to us users. Features, and formats seemed to grow in leaps and bounds. After being a Wordperfect fan for years, I finally lost interest in the race when I realised there was nothing in it for me in the next upgrade cycle. Since that time I have settled on two writing tools that do the vast bulk of everything I need. I use Open Office as my main office tool, which has evolved from slightly irritating to very handy as both the codebase and my familiarity has improved over the years. For quick notes, hacking scripts and keeping track of stuff, I long ago replaced notepad with Notepad++. Its just brill!

Anyway, thats me. You may be just desperate to find a new wordprocessor or other writing software with some particular feature not found anywhere else. Take a look at this list: http://mashable.com/2008/12/13/writers-toolbox/

Not enough? Check out:
30+ Tools For The Amateur Writer

Poynter Online - Writing Tools

The Ultimate Writing Productivity Resource - Stepcase Lifehack

So there you go, another lazy post, it will probably take you longer to check out all these resources, than it took to write this.