![]() The spell checker stays out of your way, waiting to highlight misspelled words after you complete your paragraph (and thus your thought) instead of sending out the warning immediately and interrupting your concentration. In use, no auto-tools try to second-guess the author or apply formatting the author didn’t intend, and every tool is a single click away, not buried in nested menus. Those who prefer the truly ascetic can reduce the amount of interface even further by turning off the ruler and toolbar, leaving only the pulldown menu and a document framed in a thin grey border. To the side of your document a band of tool palettes allow you to access most functions with a single click, and you can open, close, detach, and attach the palettes as you like, allowing you to work with just the single palette you need the most. You work in a brushed steel frame with just a handful of icons along the top rather than the scads of floating and docked icon palettes that litter other software. Mellel’s interface is sleek, simple, and built in the gorgeous and responsive Cocoa environment (Word is built in Carbon, whose fonts are not as clear and whose interface is a bit less responsive). Mellel isn’t for everybody, but I’ve learned to appreciate it. At the same time, it lacks some useful functionality Microsoft Word has had for ages. And by daring to start fresh and re-examine what a word processor’s interface should look like, Mellel provides a comfortable and productive working environment for the writer, along with additional tools and characteristics that make it a particularly apt piece of software for technical writing. Mellel is refreshing because it makes no pretense of aping the Microsoft Word interface – the trap most contenders fall into, including StarOffice, Abiword, and others – opting instead to build a word processor with a new focus and design. Its biggest selling point is its compatibility in a world where the Word format is near-universal. ![]() Despite its popularity, Word for the Mac has lots of problems, including the semi-frequent crash, annoying dialogue boxes, and high memory consumption. Appleworks, Apple’s older word processor, has been essentially left to dry on the pre-OS X vine in lieu of Pages, Apple’s OS X offering (and part of the iworks suite). Several word processors are available for the Macintosh, but none is more common than Microsoft Word, which is completely compatible with the Windows version. But a friend with a Mac introduced me to a word processor that caught my interest immediately: Mellel, and when I switched from Linux to the Mac, Mellel became my word processor of choice for research and technical papers. I first bumped into Mellel when I was a graduate student ploughing through a degree in development economics, using StarOffice on SUSE Linux 9.0.
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