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Four-and-a-half stars?!
That's a pretty high rating for an app with such serious cons, don't you think? I got WriteRoom 1.0 when it was free and found it to be pretty cool.
That said, it should have remained a free app. Perhaps Jesse could have solicited donations for those who are so inclined, but I certainly didn't find it so compelling that I would pay for an "upgrade."
I just don't see the programming effort going into WriteRoom that would make it worth it. It seems like a comp sci class project -- not that it isn't well done, it's just that I cannot see paying so much for it.

If this was truly "like a comp sci class project" then I'm sure you can code and design far, far better than Jesse Grosjean. I mean, if this guy could do it, so could you, couldn't you?

I recommend Think. It's free, and it lets you focus on any app you want—text editor, web browser, whatever.
http://freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7013

It might be good to mention that Jesse Grosjean has just released the 2.0 version of TaskPaper, his simple-is-better task manager. Upgrades are free for those who licensed 1.0. It has enough new features, I'm thinking of sticking with it rather than going with Things. It'll also work as a basic outliner program and an iPhone version is apparently in the works. There's a video at his site that explains its unique features. If you hate the learning curve of the high-end task managers, you're likely to enjoy TaskPaper. Like WriteRoom, it can't do everything, but what it does it does well.
While we're on the topic of "unitasker" applications, I was talking to another writer/editor this week about how someone needs to create one that'll do one thing well--read text aloud as a way to proof. Mistakes we never see reading magically appear when a text is read aloud. Also, it'd be great for checking quotations and comparing scanned text with the original. I can proof an OCRed text at about 150 wpm that way. I doubt I can get above 25 wpm looking from screen to book and back. And the former is more accurate and less tiring.
The problem is that Apple's standard text-to-speech features (taken up by many applications) only allow programmers to read either the entire text of a document starting at the beginning or a selected block of text in its entirety. What's needed is an application that starts reading at the cursor, highlights each word as it is read, and stops (for text correction) on command. It'd also be helpful if it had a mode where it would state punctuation aloud, saying "colon" for a colon and "semi-colon" for a semi-colon. It should also scroll to keep the text being read on screen.
A one-trick pony? Yes, but a very handy little pony.

I would hardly call WriteRoom a "major Mac writing program." Personally, I don't see the attraction, especially not for $25! Bean is a very nice (and totally free) word processor that also has a full-screen mode with customizable background and text colors. Anyone intrigued by WriteRoom should give Bean a try.

"Expensive" is a pretty valid complaint for some software, but for a product that costs $25 I don't think you're being fair at all.

Of course it's fair. Expensive means the price is higher than the perceived value of the commodity.

MacJournal is another application, a personal favorite, that allows "uni-tasking" -- black background with green-glow texts.

"Expensive" is a pretty valid complaint for some software, but for a product that costs $25 I don't think you're being fair at all.

When there are excellent free programs that offer similar features, $25 is definitely too expensive.

How about outlining tools, support for OSX system spell check, synonym dictionary, language support... I do not mean bloating the software but these are all tools for efficient writing.

rampancy said:

Y'see, where I have a problem is the high cost for a relatively simple program. With all that is built-in to Cocoa, creating an app like WriteRoom shouldn't be that big an effort. Maybe that plug-in mojo that worked in Tiger, but has yet to work in Leopard is tricky enough to fetch a high fee, but the basic functionality is, well, basic.

If I were a "far, far better" coder than Jesse and he charges $25 for an app that does one thing, then I'd have to charge $100 for an app that does nothing. ;)

You could just take the Terminal application, use the "Terminal Inspector" (Show Info or Set Title...) under the Edit menu to set the terminal background to any color you want as well as the text. vi, the basic unix editing application isn't entirely difficult to use, just a few basic commands to get started and with a bit of learning, the environment can access some basic unix commands that are extremely flexible. All of this for free. I do this on the Mac, but I also do the same under Vista with Cygwin although the Cygwin/Windows environment isn't integrated where it is on the unix underpinnings of OSX. There are things that you can do under unix in minutes or less that would take hours in a standard word processor on under Windows or OSX.

WriteRoom.app is a milestone for MacOS X, benchmarking UI evolution within the Mac user community. As a NeXT developer, appreciation for efficiency and productivity apps .vs. Windows-type feature creep programs cluttering the userspace is a welcome development.
The simplicity of a tool that just works is nice to have in WriteRoom .vs. Word.