Distraction-Free Reading On Your Mac

Navid Safabakhsh
2 min readApr 1, 2022

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I always thought it was difficult to read an article without being distracted by everything happening inside the browser AND outside the browser.

There are many extensions that do a good job at cleaning up the mess inside the browser but there was always a mess outside the browser that took my attention away as well.

The tabs, the notifications, the messy desktop… there was always this low level noise in the background that bothered me.

I also had this issue where I’d like re-read something or someone would email me a few sentences that I’d like to read very carefully.

This would also be a problem when reading something scientifically or technically dense…

My solution would be to copy and paste it in Mac’s TextEdit, clean up the format, enlarge the font and full screen it so I wouldn’t focus on anything else.

So I thought it would be a good idea to release a small app to just that.

Quiet Reader is a free Mac App that lets you do 2 things.

It let’s you read articles (from your browser) or text highlights (from any app) distraction free. We take away all the ads, notifications, tabs and messy desktop so you can focus on what you’re reading.

To make the app, I collaborated with ZeppelinLabs. Alejandro and the team there were interested in becoming partners in the project instead of just being hired as an agency. They were so easy to work with. They always had great contributions at every step of the app. We both knew this would be a small app but thought it would be a fun little project we could release together.

We understand that the app could use more polish but we think this is “good enough” at this stage to gauge the interest in the app before we spend more time on it.

I’d also like to apologize for all the permissions we ask on the app… we had no way of getting around that.

Let us know what you think! Click here to download

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