Flowstate App Reviews

Weither you are just trying to create, brainstorm, or think about a strategic move, this is the app for you. I have been looking for a long time for something like this. This will allow you to spend less time on « urgent & unimportant tasks » but focus instead on the « important & non urgent tasks » which are the real game changer

… Usability ist eher semi, weil die Bedienung nicht einfach zu durchschauen ist. … man alle 5 Sekunden schreiben muss und nicht einstellen kann, okay eher 10. … wenn man ein Dokument abschließt es nicht aufzufinden ist. Zumindest habe ich es nicht gefunden. +++ Great idea, interesting concept and awesome graphics – Usability isn´t easy. Where are the saved documents? – only five seconds as parameter are to short. There is a 10 or more seconds feature missing.

This is the kind of time I wish the Apple Store offered refunds. Thought this was a great app idea, but I got burned. Terrible document management, way too minimalist to be useful. Why can I not continue a document after I finish a writing session?

Not enough features. I like the interface but it definitely demands too much for what little it gives.

The interface looks nice and simple, and the concept is alluring, yet it doesn’t offer enough features for its price. Simply a timer and an eraser. It can come in handy to force myself to write non-stop for as an exercise. But I think $5 for the app is a more justified price. I would probably not purchase it if I had a chance to try a demo version.

Simple and powerful. Please in further upgrades (if they expected) - add White Text on Black background option, please.

Best tool for freewriting ever! Thanks a lot for app, it’s worth every penny spent on it.

Please, add the sound of a typewriter and the ability to create folders (notebooks).

All told, I’ve now lost about 40 minutes of writing to this crashy app. Tried it, loved it at first despite the rough edges — but then maybe the 10th time I used it, it unexpectedly quit as I was finishing up and going back to the overview screen. When it came back up, no trace of my work. Like an idiot, I tried it again, with the same result. Very, very frustrating. Wrote the developer, and they say there’s a bug related to iCloud syncing. Frankly I wasn’t even aware it was syncing and don’t need or want it to sync at all, especially if it’s causing stability issues. I wouldn’t trust this app with anything important — and if you do use it, at least make some screenshots as you write so that if (or when) it goes down, you can at least retype your work in a real app.

I am a procrastinator. So when I came across this app I was skeptical but willing to try anything. I was surprised by how many ideas I saved and finished because I was forced to keep writing instead of continuously stopping and getting side tracked. The timed writing works. Before you start, think of a general topic you want to focus on… diary, fleshing out a story idea, fleshing out ideas for a chapter in your novel, etc. Start out with 5 minutes. I recommend this app for anyone who ends up continuously skipping around from activity to activity, or skipping around from doing what you want like writing a story to getting sidetracked right in the middle of writing out your story by web surfing aimlessly instead. This serves me as a container of free thought… I give myself permission to misspell and to punctuate inaccurately for the pursuit of creative idea nurturing.

I see other reviews to this effect, so I am leaving my two cents here in the hopes the developer ever takes a look. This app regularly will lose a recent entry with no warning or without even crashing; I’ll close the app, reopen it, and find my most recent work just completely missing. Do not purchase.

I love this concept. It’s probably the single greatest, simplest way to keep you writing once you start. The only problem I’ve had is that the thing crashes occasionally after a session and deletes my work. Luckily, it’s only happened during 10 minute intervals and the lost text isn’t a catastrophe. Fix the crashing and it’s 5 stars for sure.

This app launched end of last year at a premium price ($15). It had a brief flurry of updates and now nothing for six months. There are still many bugs, real usability concerns, and much to improve on and refine, but neither this nor the iPhone app have been updated. Big disappointment. There was so much initial press about this. It’s hard to imagine, given how simple this app is, that doing updates could require months and months of work. But nothing seems to be happening on the update front, so I’ve returned to the apps I used before testing this out. Timeboxing my writing has worked just as well for me, and saved me from the technical issues from which Flowstate still suffers.

Review is coming from a Mac mini late 2012 running Yosemite with a SSD drive running macOS Sierra GM Beta. Since this only works with EL Cap and higher I’m using Flowstate on my external SSD running the Sierra GM Beta. The app runs so smooth. Love the different times and fonts you can choose. When typing I played with the text disappearing to the point where it was ‘almost’ totally gone, and resume typing to bring the text back in a-nick-of-time. It’s fun to play around with how long you have before the text actually is gone. I like the way you can save your work as well as the different ways it can be saved, for example, by name, by date, etc. For testing, I did a bunch of text returns to get me to the bottom of the page and kept on hitting return so it’s good to know that you will never run out of a page to type on. One thing, when the time is up there’s no feedback, maybe that’s a good thing. The timer turns into a button that you click on to end the writing session, or if you prefer, just keep on writing (the good thing). This app really forces you to write. My problem is I still find myself doing spelling edits. To stop that, when I make a spelling mistake I try to either retype it or if my fingers become all thumbs I hit return and start a new line. I believe if I use this app ‘everyday’, it will help me become a better writer.

I bought this app the week it came out. I have been using it ever since. I use it both for personal and professional reasons. It has allowed me to write an insane amount of material over the course of this year and, honestly, has changed my life. Thanks Flowstate team!

I’ve ALWAYS had a problem with editing and reediting my text (emails, …) over and over again, so that it always takes me at least an hour to write a simple paragraph! This app is the very first (and only) app that has addressed that bad habit. I can’t believe someone actually thought of doing this! I’ve already slightly changed the way I write in doing this review, which is why I’m doing it. OMG. This app is fracking fantastic. It’s worth it’s weight in gold! I hope it’s OK to say “fracking” ;-).

Read about this app yesterday and had to give it a try. Loving it so far. Certainly is terrifying knowing that if you stop, all your work gets erased. Not sure if I’ve entered into the highly-lauded “flowstate” yet, but it is helping me get some much-needed work done in record time. I can’t vouch for the quality of said work, but at least it’s getting done vs. me procrastinating. It’s got a simple, slick design, and it feels great to use. That’s a huge plus. Helps make coming back to this terrifying app an oddly *pleasurable experience. *Okay, so maybe I’m a bit of a masochist.

This review ended up getting very long. If you don’t want to read it all, here’s the TL;DR: The concept is great, but the program is really buggy right now and I feel that it’s missing some important features that I expect from a writing program. Now here’s the full review: When I first got the iPhone app of this program, I immediately fell in love with it. It was an easy choice to buy it on my mac. I loved the concept and wanted my notes to sync. Unfortunately, I’ve had some trouble with this desktop version. The biggest problem is that sometimes won’t let me click on my saved notes. When it starts acting like this, clicking on the new document icon (not the timed write) will always make the program crash. And the most annoying part is that even quitting the app and restarting the computer doesn’t fix the problem. Luckily, the timed write function always works. In fact, sometimes starting a new timed write will even “fix” the other bugs (not sure why!) I was disappointed that the desktop app didn’t have a few more options in it when I started using it. I would like to be able to have italics and be able to bold text within the “editing” portion of the app. I understand the main selling point of this app is simplicity, but I don’t consider italics or bold text to be very complex and sometimes those features would be very helpful. Another thing I would like to see in an update that I feel this program is lacking is a simple print mode where I can set margins and then send my writing to the printer. It seems a little strange to me that I have to copy and paste my writings into Word once I finish them just to print them. Another thing Flowstate currently lacks is the ability to be able to reenter an existing document into the timed write mode. I like to work in short burst of writing, so I’ll usually only set the timer for 5 minutes. The problem is that then I would like to continue developing my idea the next day in the timed write mode, but I have to make a new document to be able to start the timed write mode again. My other gripe with the desktop version is that when I use it I get the feeling that the developers just ported the app to desktop. The desktop program doesn’t take advantage of the fact that it’s operating on a much larger screen. the layout is almost identical to the app, which does’t seem right considering that my iPhone screen is 5.5 inches and my iMac’s screen is 21.5 inches. Although I have my complaints about the desktop program, the idea of this program is great and I am confident that the developers of this app will resolve the bugs in future updates and possibly even one or two of my feature requests.

Just a littly bit scary, at first, but in fact it is a very encouraging program, I find. When I got it yesterday I discovered that the save option didn’t work… wasn’t being recorded at all, so when I cut part of my work it evaporated completely. However when I come back here today it is fixed before I can report it. Fast work! And good work. Wouldn’t mind green on black text option, tho, maybe in the future?

Oh my. Freewriting is the practice popularly taught in college composition courses: just write, keep going, pen to the page, and don’t worry about anything. Keep going and you will enter a “free” zone — the “flow” — and your originality appears! The idea is that when you try to write in the ordinary, non-zone, way, you are always hostage to your fears and inhibitions: you are blocked from the creative you that lies downtrodden, underneath. Kerouac said he wrote “On The Road” this way, taping all his typewriter pages into one long roll and just typing and typing and typing. …. So now comes Flowstate, a writing program that blocks out everything that might distract you and focuses you on the page of writing. Other writing programs have the option to do this too: Word and Scrivener and many others. BUT there’s something more in Flowstate. With this cruel program you set the amount of time you want to write, to be in the flow, and then the distracting world is shut out and the blank page appears and you start. But here’s the medieval punishment part. If you stop writing for five seconds — 1,2,3,4,5— everything you have written in that session fades away. Fades away, as in forever. So keep typing. So what you have here is touchy-feely contemporary writing theory designed to bring out your (assumed) inner creativity — combined with severe punishment! Kinky, no? Oh, did I say that I love it? It works.