Mellel and Lion

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strongbow
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Mellel and Lion

Post by strongbow »

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
daiyi
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by daiyi »

Any confirmation of this? If true, I won't be upgrading to Lion immediately.

Thanks in advance.
Timotheus
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by Timotheus »

I have no idea; but in the past Mellel was always Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard ready by the time these systems came out, and I presume this time things won't be different. So I don't think there is any reason for pessimism.
rpcameron
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by rpcameron »

Timotheus wrote:I have no idea; but in the past Mellel was always Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard ready by the time these systems came out, and I presume this time things won't be different. So I don't think there is any reason for pessimism.
Actually, that's not quite true. When Snow Leopard (10.6) first came out there were issues with Mellel. There were problems with Mellel crashing on Snow Leopard that weren't fixed until 2.6.3 or 2.7.2, which was a couple of months after its release. This included changes to the way Mellel stored/accessed preferences, leaving style sets which were uneditable, and there were quite a bit of font-related issues with corrupted font caches and issues accessing glyph substitutions.

Since Lion is going to introduce more changes under-the-hood about the way programs access memory, the ability to save state and built-in versioning support for documents, the OP is quite right to question Mellel's readiness. Furthermore, it might be worth asking how well (or rather, if) Mellel will support new features such as Lion's new full screen API, auto saving, application resume and versioning. While Mellel implements some of these features on its own, using the system-provided APIs for these features will help ensure a smoother transition and reduce the chances of incompatibilities and problems down the road.
— Robert Cameron
Timotheus
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by Timotheus »

Thanks, Patrick, for your correction. Clearly, my memory failed me here, perhaps because I purchased Snow Leopard some six months after its release, and then didn't have any issues.

But I would be nice to get some comment from the developers.
ozean
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by ozean »

I agree. It would be great if Eyal or Ori could offer us a short comment if they plan to release an update to Mellel in July that will either (a) only assure that Mellel continues running as it does right now, or (b) even tell us which new features (auto save & versioning, full screen support etc.) Mellel will support in Lion (and for which version this support is planned). It would be marvelous if (b) happens! :D
Eyal Redler
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by Eyal Redler »

I believe earlier builds of Lion had some issues with Mellel, they are now resolved and Mellel works OK with the latest build of Lion.
At any rate, we will make sure Mellel works with Lion when Lion comes out.
Eyal Redler
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jannuss
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by jannuss »

That's good news!

Thank you, Eyal.
ozean
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by ozean »

Yes, good news. :)

It would be really excellent if Mellel could support auto-save and versioning soonish. I guess using the proper full-screen API for Lion would be nice to have, too, but versioning would be even better.

(I am not saying that these features are more important than indexing or any other feature that we have been waiting for though…)
rpcameron
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by rpcameron »

Eyal Redler wrote:I believe earlier builds of Lion had some issues with Mellel, they are now resolved and Mellel works OK with the latest build of Lion.
At any rate, we will make sure Mellel works with Lion when Lion comes out.
Does the lack of certainty of Mellel's previous compatibility mean that you did not encounter it in your testing, or that you gathered the information from reports and you are not personally testing Mellel against the developer builds of Lion? The reason I ask is because people who updated early to Snow Leopard encountered problems that were not fixed right away, and I believe that testing against developer builds would aid in compatibility.
— Robert Cameron
ozean
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by ozean »

rpcameron wrote:Does the lack of certainty of Mellel's previous compatibility mean that you did not encounter it in your testing, or that you gathered the information from reports and you are not personally testing Mellel against the developer builds of Lion? The reason I ask is because people who updated early to Snow Leopard encountered problems that were not fixed right away, and I believe that testing against developer builds would aid in compatibility.
Good observation! – I also had the impression that the Redlers might not be working with developer builds of Lion. If that is the case, then this would probably also mean that support for Lion APIs is not exactly around the corner… :(
rpcameron
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by rpcameron »

ozean wrote:
rpcameron wrote:Does the lack of certainty of Mellel's previous compatibility mean that you did not encounter it in your testing, or that you gathered the information from reports and you are not personally testing Mellel against the developer builds of Lion? The reason I ask is because people who updated early to Snow Leopard encountered problems that were not fixed right away, and I believe that testing against developer builds would aid in compatibility.
Good observation! – I also had the impression that the Redlers might not be working with developer builds of Lion. If that is the case, then this would probably also mean that support for Lion APIs is not exactly around the corner… :(
With previous versions of Mellel, I could understand why Mellel wasn't tested against pre-release versions/developer seeds of OS X. Access to those builds requires a paid developer account, but a paid developer account is not required for access to the SDK and building applications.

However, since Mellel is now available in the App Store, this means that a paid developer account is necessary, and therefore it brings access to pre-release versions/developer seeds of OS X, including the Lion developer builds. The question remains, however, whether the developers are actually taking advantage of the access to ensure Mellel plays nicely with Lion.

(I'm personally still on 2.6.x, since nothing introduced since has been worth the paid upgrade. If Mellel gets better PDF export, better/more flexible numbering (including paragraphs/lines), glossing and more flexible styles, I may consider it. Heck, I'd probably pay for the upgrade if they actually implemented all the useful OpenType tables and gave us real small caps, not all small caps.)
— Robert Cameron
Eyal Redler
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by Eyal Redler »

We have been developing Mellel for many years and saw many OS version updates. With almost all versions, early beta and developer previews have trouble with many applications, including Mellel (at least sometimes) usually it's just bugs in the OS which are eventually solved without need for us to make modifications to the app in order to make it work.

This was also the case with Lion. We've received reports about problems with earlier builds but we didn't test it ourselves because we know that these builds are unstable and there no reason to spend time chasing a non existing.

As I side note, I think what roaring apps are doing is not very fair, When they say such and such app doesn't work they are giving the app maker bad publicity which is not justified. Lion is unreleased, the crash may be the fault of Lion and may be resolved in later builds (like it did with Mellel) and even if the problem is the fault of the developer he may be already working on a fix which he will release when the time is due (when Lion is released).

All this is regarding Lion compatibility which is, as I've mentioned before, OK for 2.8.2. Regarding Lion feature adoption, we will make our plans public in the next few days.
Eyal Redler
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strongbow
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by strongbow »

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.
rpcameron
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Re: Mellel and Lion

Post by rpcameron »

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.
I tend to agree with this idea. Mellel has always been a bit behind in design an standards. Updates for compatibility are always months behind major OS upgrades, but othr developers seem to have no problem testing against developer seeds and releasing bug-free versions with new OS releases.

Likewise, Mellel has lagged in supporting or embracing other advancements or enhancements. (For instance, why are we still plagued with brushed metal and no NSToolBar that we can selectively hide?) Mellel's only saving graces are style variations, RTL support that exceeds ATSUI, stellar Arabic support (or so I hear, since I do not use this), and better OpenType support (mostly) that ATSUI. However, Mellel fails to support all OpenType feature tables, some of those it implements are done either not fully or improperly.

Asking for an application (especially a word processor) to work straight away with the latest OS release is not asking too much. Likewise, it is not asking too much for such a program to support new and relevant APIs (like versioning, resume, and system-provided full screening) when they become available.

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.
— Robert Cameron
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