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strongbow wrote:I beg to differ. As far as I can see, roaringApp is a wiki; so it should be fairly easy to enter uptodate information, if you are concerned about publicity.

The trouble is, they were sitting there, giving us (and others, I'm sure) bad publicity without our knowledge. I was not aware of this site until I read about it in this thread. (Reminds my a bit from the "Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy" where the earth is to be demolished and the demolishers don't understand why the people are so upset since they were supposed know about it from a note that was posted in some far region of the galaxy)

Again,I don't mind that they did this compatibility chart for Snow Leopard or Leopard, if a developer fails to address issues with his app on a released version of the OS then the public should be warned and this is a very relevant information to people who wish to upgrade, but Lion is still a beta and is not supposed to be used for anything other then internal testing for developers and apple. How is this table useful or relevant to anyone in the general public?
They should avoid doing these tables for unreleased software.

rpcameron wrote:As Mellel fails to move forward, I find myself looking to the other wide of the fence for greener pastures, and a word processor that will give me the features I need, and support the features my OS will provide.

Just out of curiosity: What do you have in mind?

Der Amtmann wrote:

rpcameron wrote:As Mellel fails to move forward, I find myself looking to the other wide of the fence for greener pastures, and a word processor that will give me the features I need, and support the features my OS will provide.

Just out of curiosity: What do you have in mind?

Nisus is slowly improving, and has nearly brought back all of the features it had before the switch to OS X. The most important missing feature for me is glossing. (I know this can be replicated with tables, but it's still not quite the same. This is the only feature from Word that I truly want.)

Sadly, the greatest control and flexibility comes from TeX. It is a beast to use, but it supports every feature I could want, handles OpenType with aplomb, and produces a result that cannot be matched by nearly any other tool on the market. I will have to relearn a bit, since I haven't used it since highschool, but Mellel's advancement does not seem to be happening with any great speed and I am left wanting.

Five, or even three years ago I was a very staunch supporter of Mellel; now, to be honest, a rather tepid one. Tired of waiting too long for too many things.

In the past five years, I have seen gradually turning this forum from a very crowded place into an almost deserted one. Sad but true.

For my short documents I now mostly use Nisus. It's not perfect, but it's nice, very nice. All my really long documents (my readers for my students, for instance) are still in Mellel, because in my opinion for making very long documents with a host of footnotes (like my readers are) Mellel is still superior to Nisus. But in many other respects it is not.

And now, very recently, I have discovered, or rather rediscovered, LaTeX. I always thought it was too difficult for me (I'm in the humanities, and not a youngster anymore). But now, after having read some excellent (and free!) introductions and after some trying out, falling and standing up again, to my great joy I begin to see it is not. And LaTeX offers me right now all the features I could possibly desire in two lifetimes. No need for waiting anymore. Everything you could possibly want is already there. I have made up my mind. This is the way to go.

Lot of negative reviews here! For my part, I'm probably not a "power-user" but Mellel does a really fine job for me and I do not use all the features. And I'll wait before I'll upgrade to Lion. There is always problems with a new OS, with many softwares. No use to pin one specifically. It's (computer) life!

I have been curious with LaTex. I really tried it but gave up. It's not for "power-user" but really "super hero - users"! ; ))

I split my work. For exchange purposes, Nisus Writer Pro works better; it also integrates well with Scrivener. But for heavy duty work, Mellel is my main tool, nothing beats it. Would I like more, better, and refinement in Mellel? Absolutely. But it is always a compromise.

I actually liked Papyrus and used it to publish a book; it did everything I needed for that project to provide copy-ready material for the printer. But the English version has not been updated for five years and lacks much that the German updated version does. They have been promising the English edition for 3½ years, but wont even answer questions about it. So, Papyrus is sitting basically unused, unless I have to update the book for another printing. So while Mellel has been relatively slow, it gives me most of what I need except better control on the images. And the developers do respond occasionally.

strongbow wrote:RoaringApps states that Mellel does not work under Lion (10.7). Is there any news on a furture release of Mellel which will solve this?
Thanks, strongbow

It seems that this was fixed now. http://roaringapps.com/app:690

We had been pondering whether to try and fix what was problematic - as it was obviously something with that early version of Lion, not with Mellel - and we've decided to wait for a later build of Lion which, as it turns out, fixed the problem and Mellel does run nicely with it.

Great news. Thanks!

ealvarez wrote:Lot of negative reviews here! For my part, I'm probably not a "power-user" but Mellel does a really fine job for me and I do not use all the features.

I agree. I have Scrivener, Word and a couple of other word processors but Mellel is my favorite by a mile. It is always open and I use it use it throughout the day. It's like an old friend. Maybe it's not perfect but it has so many good qualities and is so flexible that, for me, it is a joy to use.

Some of the bashing of Mellel probably would be better done on a "neutral" site rather than on the Mellel board. Since many users here love Mellel, what good does it do to come here only to constantly complain?

If another processor is preferred, fine, switch. Go to the new app's board and sing its praises. But I'm sure that in a short time, the people who now come here only to bash Mellel soon be bashing the new app to which they've switched.

I'm not trying to offend anyone but the never-ending whining is really getting old.

miles11 wrote:Some of the bashing of Mellel probably would be better done on a "neutral" site rather than on the Mellel board. Since many users here love Mellel, what good does it do to come here only to constantly complain?

If another processor is preferred, fine, switch. Go to the new app's board and sing its praises. But I'm sure that in a short time, the people who now come here only to bash Mellel soon be bashing the new app to which they've switched.

I'm not trying to offend anyone but the never-ending whining is really getting old.

Most of the criticism is reasonable and certainly has a place here on the Forum -- let's be honest, our friends the Redlers have not been speedy with their updates. Competing with a large operation like Nisus is not a trivial task.

Mellel is also my multi-language word processor of choice, but I wonder what will happen when Apple finally, finally gets RtL working on Pages.

I think if Eyal's presence was felt a little more often here that might help some.

Janet

rpcameron wrote:Sadly, the greatest control and flexibility comes from TeX. It is a beast to use, but it supports every feature I could want, handles OpenType with aplomb, and produces a result that cannot be matched by nearly any other tool on the market. I will have to relearn a bit, since I haven't used it since highschool, but Mellel's advancement does not seem to be happening with any great speed and I am left wanting.

MMD on Scrivener is an alternative. Scriv's manual has something that somehow resembles marginalia and it's all done within Scrivener. Using an XSLT template, it translates standalone comments into side-bar notes. The mechanism is explained in the manual. The advantage is that MMD has less markup than Latex. MMD translates documents into Tex or you can get it in Openoffice/RTF as well. Worth checking out.

Some of the bashing of Mellel probably would be better done on a "neutral" site rather than on the Mellel board. Since many users here love Mellel, what good does it do to come here only to constantly complain?

If another processor is preferred, fine, switch. Go to the new app's board and sing its praises. But I'm sure that in a short time, the people who now come here only to bash Mellel soon be bashing the new app to which they've switched.

I'm not trying to offend anyone but the never-ending whining is really getting old.

It's my hope that this is discussion forum is looked at by the Redlers as a "snapshot" of the Mellel community. It's no good if they have to go elsewhere to see what people are *actually* saying about their software.

I don't really know what happened, though -- there was a great rush of activity early this year, with a promise that they would be "getting back to Mellel." For a while, this seemed true, but it seems things have slowed down again. 2.9 has been in the wings for a couple months now, with a couple of highly-requested features (line numbers & comments, afaik.)

I am with the Redlers here. In my view, it's quite rude (and injurious) to comment negatively on interim issues such as this. Do developers have nothing better to do than watch the web for statements to be corrected? Admittedly, I'm sour on wikis generally for related reasons, despite Wikipedia being one of the great creations of mankind.

I noted this in another thread: I updated to Lion, and Mellel seems fine.