The Road Less Traveled

dp · Post by dp » Fri May 25, 2007 8:21 pm

I just bought Mellel after looking hard at Nisus Writer Pro. It was nip and tuck. NWP is superior in some ways. Oddly, it was the foreign feel of Mellel that attracted me. Maybe the developers are just weird. But I can't help suspecting that having all software squeezed into a standard OS X mold is ultimately not a good thing, however much it may lower the learning curve. Time will tell. But for the moment, I'm enjoying the discovery of a different approach.

dp

http://www.youtube.com/user/MellelRedlex · Post by **Eyal Redler** » Sat May 26, 2007 8:27 am

Hi dp and thanks for the post. I wonder if you could elaborate on Mellel's foreignness. Which part or feature strike as such?

Reiner · Post by **Reiner** » Sat May 26, 2007 1:38 pm

I would say the strange thing about Mellel is, that the features which are implemented just work. Some work just easy (sometimes that easy that users even don't see it because they expect hardly to use menus etc. as e. g. with formatting text in the find-replace-dialog), others are not so easy but impressingly powerful. And as if this wouldn't be enough: bugs are very rare. I think this is very strange when you have a look at most other wordprocessors.

But there are still many construction sites, many long missed features as well as lots of disappointed hopes of users because the strange side of Mellel creates more hopes than any other wordprocessor does. But at last from this point of view Mellel is quite normal as your - the Redler's - day has only 24 hours as our days only has. Sad but true.

dp · Post by dp » Mon May 28, 2007 11:23 pm

[quote="Eyal Redler"]Hi dp and thanks for the post. I wonder if you could elaborate on Mellel's foreignness. Which part or feature strike as such?[/quote]

Sorry for the slow response. I’ve been on holiday.

The “foreignness” starts with appearance. The stark simplicity of Mellel’s interface is unusual in my experience. Whether it attracts or repels probably depends upon who is looking.

Functionally, I refer to concepts that I’ve never run across before, like the tab with two tails, and features that are analogous to what is seen in other applications, but are executed differently in Mellel. This would include variables (which can be made either document-specific or the default), auto-titles (which are apparently not quite the same as headers), mentions (which seem to be like variables for auto-titles), and a relationship between character, paragraph, and section styles that is a bit unusual.

It may be inconsistent that I’m attracted by the simplicity of the interface and the complexity of the features. But I’m hopeful that the latter reflects a carefully considered approach that’s better than the way I’m used to doing things. The very reasonable price makes it worth the minimal risk.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MellelRedlex · Post by **Eyal Redler** » Tue May 29, 2007 8:55 am

Thanks for the response, dp.
Could you elaborate a bit about the "simplicity of the interface"? What makes it simple in your view?

It may be inconsistent that I’m attracted by the simplicity of the interface and the complexity of the features

I think it makes a lot of sense. You want to have a complex (=powerfull) tool that's easy to use. That's what we're trying to make here.

dp · Post by dp » Tue May 29, 2007 4:05 pm

[quote="Eyal Redler"]Thanks for the response, dp.
Could you elaborate a bit about the "simplicity of the interface"? What makes it simple in your view?[/quote]

You can have any color you wish, as long as it's gray. You can have any icons you wish, as long as you wish for those already on the toolbar. You can put them in any order you wish, as long as it's the default order. Your icons can be works of art, as long as your taste in art runs to stick figures and 2-dimensional line drawings. Yet, except for Toggle Combined/Separate view, I knew what each icon did without having to rollover and read the label. Some would find this restrictive. But being more keyboard-oriented than mouse-oriented, I'm not inclined to add any more icons. Again, it probably depends on the user.

It would appear that I'm also simple-minded, since I can't get the quote feature to work.

miles11 · Post by **miles11** » Wed May 30, 2007 2:30 am

You can have any color you wish, as long as it's gray. You can have any icons you wish, as long as you wish for those already on the toolbar.

If, by color, you're talking about the brushed metal look, there's a preference setting (a pull down menu) under Appearance where you can choose the aqua look for your documents. You can also choose the background color for your documents.

As for the icons in the toolbar, I hadn't even thought about changing them. You can access document settings and formatting commands in all kinds of ways: through the palettes, the menus in the menu bar, the small drop-down menu at the bottome left of the window, the contextual menu and keyboard shortcuts. Yeah, and through the icons in the toolbar. : )

I agree completely with Reiner when he says:

I would say the strange thing about Mellel is, that the features which are implemented just work.

I haven't opened Word in over a year, and couldn't be happier about it. After a while, it seems like sheer torture to have to work in bug-ridden Word. I don't know of any other word processor that's as comfortable and fun to use as Mellel.