Don't you think introductions are awfully boring? Holden Caulfield and I do. So, with his kind permission, let's skip it altogether and get right down to business. This newsletter has several goals -- to notify you about news concerning Mellel, to spread some wisdom around (i.e., tips and dubious tricks) and when time and will will permit, a little about some more general stuff.
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel Tips:
Mellel News
We're the Greatest (revisited) -- A most glaring review of Mellel appeared in Mystica.cc (Wired Words). Mellel got 4.5 Apples our of 5. This review mainly contains an interview with Ori Redler from RedleX. It's the fifth review of Mellel in April, so apparently we've done something right by some fortunate mistake.
We have a Beta -- Mellel 1.5.5 (was: 1.5.2) is out and about and doing the usual rounds with our beta testers. So far the response is very good, which means that either it's so wonderful that no one has anything to comment about, or that some of the beta testers are slacking off. We have our suspicions in this matter, but as Fox News carefully state before every commercial break: we report, you decide.
To the Beta itself (those of you who are beta testers may skip). Our main focus with this version was on rooting out several bugging deficiencies with our style system. Namely: creating small variations to a style without causing the character style menu to get unnecessarily long; switching between styles without losing the variations (like bold and italicised text); and some manner by which to incorporate or replace document (temporary) styles. Several major new features in the new release attend to that:
- Character Style Variation (AKA sub-styles): With this new option, accessible as an addition to character styles, you can set up to 8 variations for any character style. For example, you may set a regular face for the base style, bold for the second, italic for the third, bold-italic for the forth and so on. You can use the preferences to set custom names for the variations, so they are more readily recognisable.
When changing an attribute of the Base style, all the variations under this style will inherit the changed attribute, unless the variation had this attribute changed. For example, If you change the colour of variation E to red and then change the colour of the base variation to Blue, all the variations will be in blue, except for variation E which will remain red.
Also, when setting the style, you have the option to press the "Reset Variations" to reboot all the variations so that they will all inherit the base style variation attributes.
- Replace styles: With this option you can replace any global or document style or even an unsaved style modification with any paragraph or character style you have. At heart, this is a pure power-user option, meant for users who use styles consistently but also for anyone who wish to migrate old word processor files to Mellel, to style large RTF files, and so on.
- Font Matching: This option allows you to safely switch fonts while maintaining your font face selections. For example, if you have a piece of text using Times, Times Bold and Times Bold-Italic. When you select the font Helvetica for this text, Mellel will automatically try to match all the font faces you've been using. In this case, it will change Times to Helvetica, Times bold to Helvetica Bold and Times Bold-Italic to Helvetica Bold-Italic.
- Common Shortcuts: following popular demand, we've implemented the option to use Cmd+B to change to bold face, Cmd+U for underline and Cmd+I for italic face. Those changes will be applied ad-hoc and are not part of the variations system.
Mellel 1.5.5 also introduces improvements in other areas:
- Opening DOC files and Text files: Mellel now supports AntiWord service. This means that once you've installed this service you'll be able to open MS Word .doc files by drag and drop. Mellel also adds support for opening plain text files (.txt) by drag and drop. You can set the default encoding for opening plain text files from the preferences.
- Find and Replace enhancements: Basically, find and replace works much faster now (especially with "Replace All"). We also added a progress bar and display the find results (x found, x replaced, not found, and so on).
What's Going On
The Future of Music -- Apple launched its "iTunes" music store. The shop offers the option to browse, listen to 30 seconds of every song and of course buy albums or individual songs (for a Dollar a piece) and burn them to a CD or transfer them to an iPod-- all from within the iTunes 4 music player. The songs are encoded in the new MPEG-4 encoding format called AAC, which delivers a much higher quality than MP3 at a much smaller compressed size (or so it is claimed, at least).
The iTunes store is offered only to Mac users in the United States at this point, but is scheduled to expand its services to Mac users in other countries and to PC users. The last would probably come as a "regular" internet store.
Being a "foreigner" (i.e., not residing in the United States) I cannot give full report on the buying experience from end-to-end. Still, as the title implies, it seems to me this new store is indeed the first step in reshaping the future of the music business.
The futuristic aspect of the store is not in the improved encoding standard, speed, the comfortable search options or the store organisation (although all those are very much improved compared to existing online music stores like PressPlay). The real change here is in the context in which you shop for music. In the iTunes store you buy the music where you will use it -- from within the music player. It's like buying the home groceries from within the refrigerator or purchasing movies using the television remote control -- once you've done it this way, it will be very hard to go back to doing it any other way.
Another important change is in the terminology. You don't rent songs and you're not treated like a criminal (as is common in some online services) -- you buy music. It's yours. Forever. All the red tape, the limitations, the DRMs and such stuff are concealed. It seems like a small thing, but this is the whole idea. Apple does not try to reinvent online buying -- it just reorders things in a way that makes sense.
Express Yourself -- Old Nisus Writer fans were all abuzz for the last couple of days over the first beta release of Nisus Express, the heir apparent to the old Nisus Writer. We thought about mimicking Apple here and placing an ad in the New York times reading "Welcome Nisus. Seriously.", but then decided it would be a bit too much fuss over a little joke. So we didn't.
Mellel Tips
Thesaurus -- One of the things many writers regularly use is a thesaurus -- a repository of word synonyms, explanations, grammatical information, and so on.
Mellel does not contain a built-in thesaurus, but there are many free or for-pay thesauruses which you can hook-up with Mellel with relative ease. Following is a partial list of such free thesauruses.
WordNet: a lexical database of the English language at Princeton university. Offers a dictionary and thesaurus you can use via the Services menu or as a stand alone application.
There are currently two versions of WordNet for Mac OS X. Both contain the same information, but are organised quite differently. The more extensive (and in my opinion overly verbose) is the one by William Taysom from Princeton University. It doesn't work as a service, but is very useful nevertheless.
Another is by Erik Doernenburg. It is based on a slightly older version of Word Net and is not updated that often, but is more convenient when browsing information.
OmniDictionary: free and extensive. Enable connecting to 11 different dictionaries and serves the results in a very handy fashion. Can be activated from within Mellel by selecting the word and pressing Cmd+= (or by going to the Services menu and selecting OmniDictionary.
Kotonoko: a free dictionary that, unfortunately, uses an interface in Japanese. I cannot vouch for its quality, but it's free, so...
UltraLingua: a very nice thesaurus and dictionary by UltraLingua. Also offers several translation dictionaries. The information is not as extensive as in WordNet, but served a bit more conveniently. If you need a translation between German, Spanish, Italian, French, Norwegian, Latin, Portuguese and English, this is a nice option. Also contains grammatical and definitions dictionaries for English and French. The price is $30 per item.
SpellCatcher X: a nice but a bit expensive spell checker with what is described as "instant thesaurus look-up." Costs $40.
Grammarian: used to be a Cassidy and Green product, but now with Linguisoft. Looks very nice and supports "definitions", but this is really a grammar checker, not a thesaurus.
Online Thesaurus: there are several online thesauruses which do not strictly fall under the "use with Mellel" roof but are nevertheless useful. Apple's Sherlock offers the services of Dictionary.com and accompanying Thesaurus. Since Sherlock is very slow and limited, a much better option is Watson by Karelia. It's a $29 utility that offers not just a thesaurus but also many other dictionaries for style, general info, quotations and so on. Worth every penny. If you don't mind using a browser, you may try Thesaurus.com or Merriam Webster online or Bartleby online which has a very rich pool of other resources.
