Mellel 1.8 and 1.8.1, the new Mellel guide, The rise and fall of Mellel's price, Apple as an entertainment company, and the usual gang of cuddly typos
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel Tips:
Mellel News
1.8 is out... No! It’s 1.8.1 already! -- As promised and right on schedule (yeah, right) Mellel 1.8 was released on September 13, immediately followed by Mellel 1.8.1, released just a couple of days ago. Bashful and timid as we are, we did not tell you about these developments up until now, but there’s much to tell.
Mellel 1.8 includes two exciting new options:
- Outline: Mellel now offers an outline pane allowing you to create, edit, organise, change level (also for footnotes!), demote and promote outline items, control their format and other useful options. We have created the outliner following user comments and request for an easy way to view the content whole document and manipulate both structure and content through this 'skeleton' view. Nothing more than that. We were pleasantly surprised, however, to discover that we did well enough to also enter Mellel into the realm of outlining tools. Ted Goranson of ATPM has mentioned us in is on-going series about outliners, and current and future options were also hotly debated on our forum. This kind of started our appetite here.
- OpenType: Mellel is the first native Mac OS X application to support the OpenType font technology (Adobe's applications also offer similar support). Supporting this option, Mellel 1.8 now offers a host of advanced typographical options like small caps, ordinals, old style numbering, fractions, and more. Even more importantly, Mellel now fully support Syriac and ads support for special ligatures in Arabic and trope marks with Hebrew (with the last three, Mellel is the only application on the Mac to offer this level of support).
Mellel 1.8.1 mainly offers one small huge improvement: speed. With this update we've finally tackled the speed issue in the two most important fronts: typing in long paragraphs and typing in long documents. Happily, we were able to significantly improve the situation with both, speeding up the typing speed by approximately 2000 per cent. .
Tutorial for beginners -- A group of initiative Mellel users have prepared two extensive guides for beginners with Mellel. The first guide (written by Margaret Davis, Frank Esposito Jr, W. Clifton Oliver and Robin Taylor) offers an all-around guide for beginners, starting with the Apple keyboard and down to Mellel's preferences. The second guide is a two-part guide to working with Mellel's tables written by Robin Taylor. Both guides also come as Mellel files, so you can play around with them and adjust them to your printer. Highly recommended, especially for those who do not read manuals.
Mellel Backup -- A new tool written especially for Mellel users by Christian Schwanke. Mellel Backup performs a simple yet important task: it allows you to backup and and restore Mellel's preferences. Such an option is useful when you need to safely move your preferences from one computer to the other, synchronise styles between computers, and so on. As you will see with Mellel 1.9 (hint, hint) such a tool will become quite useful.
Mellel guide -- now in usable form! -- To celebrate Mellel 1.8.1, we've also release a new version of the guide. The guide is now shorter (tutorials were removed from it) and much more usable thanks to being fully bookmarked and having all the links working properly.
The rise and fall of Mellel's price -- As you all know (and if not, now you will) Mellel's regular price is now 39$US. To this, we've added a new option, Educational license, which costs 29$US. Even better, our 5-Pack (the option formerly known as Family Pack) now costs just $59US (just a third of the price of a volume purchase of 5).
If you're into discounts, our new and most splendour volume purchase page (just kidding) offers some volume purchase option that are in most cases cheaper than volume pricing before the price raise. For example, buying 25 copies of Mellel for education will cost you just 19$US a copy.
We're on file -- Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, have added a page about Mellel. We did not write it and cannot vouch for its accuracy, but it's open for editing and corrections from you.
What's Going On
Three-visiting the iPod revolution -- Apple's second revolution came, and we've missed it. Completely. 17 months ago, when the iTunes music shop was launched we thought that it's yet another effort by Apple to improve the quality of Mac-living and make a few bucks more selling its latest gadget, the iPod. The latest quarterly results from Apple tell us that we were completely wrong.
The last quarter -- Apples fourth quarter for 2004 -- was Apple's best, in terms of sales, in nine years, topping at more than 2.3 billion USD. The sales for almost all products went up -- which is a bit surprising considering the CPU shortage and the iMac delay -- but the iPod sales simply sky-rocketed, improving to over 2 million units this quarter alone. That's more than double the sales in May-July and over 5 times last year's quarterly sales.
The iPod, according to Apple, continues to reign in the music players market. Despite an almost endless onslaught from competing companies -- there seem to be a new iPod-imitator coming out every week -- the iPod increased its share in the hard-disk based players market to 90 per cent, and about 65 per cent of all music players. The iTunes, meanwhile, does not drag its feet either, with over 70 per cent of the US legal music market.
All those iPods flying around the world change Apple very fast and quite dramatically. Apple's music business now account for about a third of its sales, and by the rate those sales are going, we can expect its music sales to make more than half of its sales during 2005. In other words, Apple will become more a consumer electronics and entertainment company than a computer manufacturer. More a Sony than a Dell.
But iPod and iTunes are just the tip of the iceberg. Apple is also transforming in other respects. It's "digital hub" idea -- turning the computer into an entertainment centre -- is transforming into chips and hard-disks in front of our eyes. The iLife suit, the fashionable computer designs, the Apple stores and now the Apple mini-stores -- all seem to indicate that Apple is disengaging itself from the concept of the computer as a work tool and adopting the concept of the computer as an "all-around" machine: a work tool for some of the people some of the time, but an entertainment tool for all of the people, when the work is done.
All this is nothing new, of course. Microsoft is offering us now to "have more fun" as the first item on the list of things to do with Windows XP, demoting "be more productive" to last place; and almost any computer maker now dusts of the grey from its boxes and offers a "fun" area at its site. The difference, however, is that Apple seem to make this work. In its financial results conference call Apple revealed some two interesting facts. The first, there is a marked "halo" effect to the growing iPod user base, increasing the number of visits to Apple's stores and Mac sales. In addition to that, and in contrast to the feeling of Many that the "Switch" campaign failed, about 45-50 per cent of all new Mac purchases are by first time users of a Macintosh. This Mac "newbies" crowed is not composed of traditional Mac market users like graphic designers, musicians or movie makers. It includes, by and large, Windows switchers and people who want their next computer to be a home entertainment centre, just like Windows XP is supposed to be, sans-viruses and with better quality.
Mellel Tips
8 more tips on using Mellel -- We've added several new tips to the list of tips on our site (we now have 20!), including most of the tips taken from the Mellel guide.
