Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

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Boban
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Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Boban »

Is there any news about the future of Mellel? I really love the application and I am now well into a large book project and would just hate to find another word processor. I used to see at least one of the brothers on the forums all the time, now I seldom do. Perhaps I'm just panicking and in a few months it will all be fine.

Any thoughts or bits of news?

As ever,

B.
Timotheus
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Timotheus »

I'm afraid that, yet another time, those who will talk about this subject, don't know, and those who know, won't talk …
loquat149
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by loquat149 »

Well, hopefully they're like me...too busy coding to frequent the chat rooms :)

Dave
Boban
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Boban »

Thanks. I'm not going to finish this book any time soon, but a few comments on the board have scared me a bit, implying that the future of Mellel isn't healthy. As for the update, I can wait.

B.
Ori Redler
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Ori Redler »

Boban wrote:Is there any news about the future of Mellel? I really love the application and I am now well into a large book project and would just hate to find another word processor. I used to see at least one of the brothers on the forums all the time, now I seldom do. Perhaps I'm just panicking and in a few months it will all be fine.

Any thoughts or bits of news?

As ever,

B.
The only news I can give you for now is that we're in advanced alpha stages and hope to get into beta soon (I would have said "days" but I've been burned by this before...).
Ori Redler from RedleX
Boban
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Boban »

Ori,

Thanks so much for this message. Once I got in the flow of my writing I haven't been on the forum as often as I once was when I had just converted to Mellel; and this meant that my information on updates (indexing, etc.) were less often. This, in itself, is a real testament to how well your word processor works for me. I do hope you'll forgive my panicky ('is-the-end-of-the-world-coming-soon') post.

I do hope that you interpret these and similar queries and signs of enthusiasm, rather than criticism. Keep up the good work.

I'm a Mellel man!

As ever,

B.
DanZac
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by DanZac »

You can probably understand that some users are a little nervous, as Ori's report is essentially the same as that given on January 5th in the forum. The xref version was in advanced alpha then too :!:
Timotheus
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Timotheus »

Worse; they said exacly the same ("advanced alpha") somewhere in the middle of 2007 …
Reiner
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Reiner »

Of course I also wish to be working with Mellel 4.2 already instead of waiting on the arrival of 2.5. But I can't imagine that nagging around here will speed up things. You could do me real favour and stop this. Be patient and stop to annoy others by writing things worse than they are.

Excuse my direct words, but I'm really annoyed by these permanent worst-case-posts.
Reiner
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by shmulik »

I've been following with bemusement the worried postings here for the past few months. It seems to me that Mellel users (and Nisus users as well, but in a different way) are stuck in a pattern that requires constant affirmation of their decision to use Mellel (or Nisus). This leads, I think, to the sense of paranoia they have regarding the future of the product--resulting in bratty statements of the type, "If Mellel goes away I'll be forced to do X!" (Am I missing something? Even if the Redlers move on to other things, will Mellel stop working?) In any case, I just don't get it. If you want other features, use something that has those features, there are a lot of good word processors out there. If you feel that Mellel is the only word processor you can possibly use--this, despite the fact that it doesn't do what you need it to--or that Mellel's development pace is getting in the way of your life, well they have pills you can take for that.


s
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by nicka »

If you want other features, use something that has those features, there are a lot of good word processors out there.
I really don't think there are, sadly, at least not for certain tasks. When you make a very reasonable list of features for processing long documents, especially academic ones, there just isn't any system that has all the features necessary, except possibly LaTeX, which is a different world of its own. Word comes close, but has serious problems with stability, consistency and speed -- and its long document features are rudimentary and unimproved for ten years. FrameMaker doesn't exist for OS X and doesn't integrate with a bibilography program anyway.
All the other applications, no matter how nice in one way or another, are really only suitable for letters, short reports, newsletters, CVs and other short documents without cross-references, various streams of notes, tables of contents, indices etc.

Compare the situation in this market to other professional or academic tasks, such as (to give a rather random list) video editing, vector graphics creation and editing, screenwriting, animation, audio recording, audio editing, statistics ... In each of these areas there is at least one industry standard program. For word processing complex documents the industry standard if there is one at all, is Word. Enough said?
wjlevin
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by wjlevin »

I've seen this sort of dynamic a number of times over the years. Users become impatient for new releases - very impatient, some times. They question their decision to use the s/w to begin with, etc. etc.

Then, after all the worry, a new version is released - and everyone's happy (ok, maybe not happy until some heretofore undiscovered bugs are fixed) and all of the worry is forgotten about.

All that said, add my name to the list of impatient users.

Wayne
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by gpolberd »

shmulik wrote:I've been following with bemusement the worried postings here for the past few months. It seems to me that Mellel users (and Nisus users as well, but in a different way) are stuck in a pattern that requires constant affirmation of their decision to use Mellel (or Nisus). This leads, I think, to the sense of paranoia they have regarding the future of the product--resulting in bratty statements of the type, "If Mellel goes away I'll be forced to do X!" (Am I missing something? Even if the Redlers move on to other things, will Mellel stop working?) In any case, I just don't get it. If you want other features, use something that has those features, there are a lot of good word processors out there. If you feel that Mellel is the only word processor you can possibly use--this, despite the fact that it doesn't do what you need it to--or that Mellel's development pace is getting in the way of your life, well they have pills you can take for that.


s
Shmulik has a point, though it's harshly put. I'd have to agree that I'm glad that Mellel is around at all, much like I'm glad that the Apple computer is around. I'm not as worried about the pace of updates as with the survival of Mellel, which of course is tied to its continued development. In the competitive, swift moving software development environment, one can legitimately worry that a very small enterprise such as Redlex could have a hard time if it doesn't keep moving ahead. This past *unusually* long period of silence was unsettling because no one knew what it meant, and it is possible, with the little knowledge about the Redlex enterprise floating around out there, that it meant Redlex was at an end, or near an end. Now that Ori has made it clear that Mellel is not a hobby, but a thriving business that they are committed to, I'm not so worried. But to suggest that, as Shmulik did, that it wouldn't make much difference if Mellel weren't around and that we should all just relax, is not at all warranted. Mellel's existence is a great good and many, many appreciate it being around. The majority of us, I believe, hope it will be around for years and years to come. I certainly do, and it's not because I couldn't make some other program work.
Phil82
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Re: Will someone tell me it's going to be OK?

Post by Phil82 »

Mellel has a lot of promise. I bought a license sometime in late 2006, because Mellel is a stable word processor and because it was promising a new version that would arrive by end of 2006 that would include x-refs and the like. I guess you could say that I bought a product based on what it was going to include. But hey, even if it would be delayed I'd get my hands on it sometime in 2007.

Mellel bills itself as a word processor that's designed for technical writing. I don't know what kind of technical writing they're referring to, but not having x-refs rules it out for most maths, physics, computer science writing. This is in addition to the lack of text wraparound images which I've found to be quite important for the journals I write to.

Anyway, some of us have deadlines we need to keep and can't keep postponing things indefinitely. So for me, it was a switch back to LaTeX while keeping an eye on Mellel until my subscription runs out.
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