In Designing Ideas Paul Scrivens reminds us that distraction-free writing apps aren’t new – typewriters and pen & paper have been around for a very long time. He then encourages us to look beyond our immediate time and medium for ideas on how to solve design problems:

The problem with designing new ideas is that we are too busy looking at what the people are designing around us to realize that many of the solutions to the problems we are facing have been solved already in a different time.

You will never be first with a new idea. You will be first with a new way to present the idea or a new way to combine that idea with another. Ideas are nothing more than mashups of the past. Once you can embrace that, your imagination opens up a bit more and you start to look elsewhere for inspiration.

This is partly why I’ve spent so much time reading up on architecture. It’s a mature, related craft that can teach us a great deal about web design – arguably more than Dribbble can.