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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

The hot new thing this year is “no distraction” modes, running a single app full screen with no notifications or any extraneous widgets. OSX and W10 both have new features for it. I see this as capitalising in that theme

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This year? WriteRoom came out in 2012.

I remember having it years before that. Here's a February 2007 blog post about WriteRoom 1.0. http://osxdaily.com/2007/02/27/writeroom-distraction-free-wr...

This is hilarious, given that the big drawback with DOS was single-tasking. Whats old is new again. I would agree that there are a ton of distractions now and sometimes I need to close my email/chat to get any work done.

We've realized that though we've made computers good at multitasking, humans really aren't very good at it.

Do you know when lack of multitasking actually hurt in MS-DOS?

Copying and formatting floppies!

Everything else wasn't that big deal as desktop user.

Actually I disagree. This isn't the old becoming new again, it's just that the terrible modern web UX design has been slowly spilling over the desktop to the point that some people now want to reclaim their attention spans. Nobody objects downloading something in the background or compiling while you read a pdf full screen or playing some music etc. It's notifications from every social media and the lack of granular control over them that's killing "modern" multitasking.

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