well the other day I decided to test this package, Why? After all Neo does my track changes (and can’t beat the price) and I-Works does my notes fairly well. So why test another package?
Well I heard over the gravepine that it is fast (and it does load fast), and chiefly it is stable (like scriv)
So I downloaded the damn thing and tested it. I was impressed enough to actually buy it.
And the best part, Scriv works well with it.
Is it missing quite a bit, like I don’t know tracking changes? Yep…
That is what the other two packages are for
After all scriv doesn’t track changes either, but I want my software to help me get my work done… and both Mellel and Scriv has something the other two don’t… FULL SCREEN
So load my radio on I Tunes and get to work
and I forgot to give a link… oh silly me
redlers.com/
Not to worry…
I forge the links all the time.
I must say, Mac software is fascinating. Such a refreshing change from windows!
Howard
Yes, there are old threads, I think, about Scr. and Mellel. Or maybe they didn’t make it with all the changes? Don’t know. But I remember many long posts here and on the DevonThink forum about Mellel with other programs. I wrote my dissertation in Mellel (Scr. was still in development and I heard about it only when working on my third and final chapter!). I still have it around and may even use it again someday. It’s a very cool program. I planned on using it to write non-fiction projects that required extensive footnoting, but I’m not so sure I will be doing that ever again. So far, Scr. seems to work fine for all my writing needs, including mild footnoting, so no need to dip into Mellel’s much more extensive footnoting capabilities. It also has a dynamic outline structure that allows you to not only create complex outlines but to move around sections of material with drag-and-drop! It’s stable and fast in my experience and has a pretty lively forum with responsive developers. Not that everyone is totally happy with it all the time! It has a fairly high learning curve and many (including myself) consider the interface to be rather clunky and non-intuitive.
But I still recommend it. Others prefer Papyrus or Nisus to Mellel, but I tried those and still came back to Mellel. I’m not sure that the structure of a word processor really fits my needs any longer, but if it ever does again, I would likely return to Mellel.
Alexandria
After asking a couple questions about text and text color I actually found a cool way to track changes. That makes the program FOR THAT USE more than just acceptable. And I use Scriv for outlining and drafts, but in combination with Mellel, they just work great
Now to the interface, it is DEFFINITELY not a MS clone
:mrgreen:
And that makes me happy, as a clam
As to the footnotes, I am using them for editing notes… just got creative with them… and I may write a deep book on how to take care of aging parents, recent experience with that one, and I have not checked the footnotes capabilities of Scriv, since I have not needed them at all
Will see how good it is for silly things like working in Spanish, which Scriv works very well, mind you… though I have found that I use different tools depending on what I am doing at the moment
(That makes me blush)
I did try hard to use and like Mellel, and I had a licence up until last year. Although I found the interface difficult to get on with, that wasn’t the deal-breaker for me. The problem with Mellel for me that it wouldn’t handle .doc files written in Chinese, which I deal with a lot. I had to round-trip through TextEdit to get them into Mellel. When I found Okito Composer – which then became Nisus – I never looked back.
So when my Mellel licence came up for renewal at the time of an upgrade, I didn’t bother. I wasn’t using it, so couldn’t justify the cost. From time to time I get a niggling “Shall I upgrade Mellel just in case?” feeling, but resist the temptation. In spite of a few small glitches – mostly it seems down to Apple’s implementation of RTF – Scrivener and Nisus – now with BookEnds in the mix – do the job just fine for me.
Mark