About Mellel 2.1, our special offers du jour and some comments about the current iPod situation
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
More for Less -- That's our motto, isn't it? After our special post-holiday discount was over, we've decided to keep some of the more popular items at a lower pricing. The price for our Boxed Edition is now $59 US (including shipping) and our 5 Pack is now $65 US, which is exactly $13 per license.
Special Bookends deal still on -- And there's more. If you're interested bibliography software, you'll probably be fascinated by our extremely ingenious combo deal for Mellel and Bookends.
As usual with discounts, prices are low: Instead of paying USD 149 for regular licenses for Mellel and Bookends, you can now purchase the pair for just USD 109. If you're a student, you're even luckier, as the two will cost you just USD 89.
Important note: If you already purchased Mellel (or Bookends) you can enjoy the regular discount when purchasing the missing one. The total sum should be about the same as with the special discount.
Mellel+Intel -- As promised, Mellel 2.0.7, out a while back, is a Universal Binary version. That is, it runs as a native application on both PPC machines and Intel Machines. Our own impression was that Mellel launches and runs faster on the new iMac and MacBook, but that may be due more to the faster processor than any change we've made to Mellel.
Just an interesting tidbit: A statistics page on the adoption rate for the new Mac Intel machine at the OmniGroup site indicates that over a third of the visitors at the site are doing so using an Intel Processor.
The Goods on Mellel 2.1 -- Much-much deeper into 2.1, we can speak more freely about what's going to get into this version. We're going to reveal ALL!
OK, now that I've got your attention, I want to go back a bit and talks about what happened with Mellel since the beginning of 2005. At the beginning of that year, we've set into a voyage to ready Mellel for much bigger and complex things. Over the last 18 months, we've introduced style sets, columns and sections, templates, page ranges, improved typography and layout and hundreds of other features.
Some of those features involved massive "under the hood" writing and rewriting. We needed to get Mellel to serve much more advanced requirement, while keeping it as fast as it was and, where possible, make it run even faster.
About 18 months later, the mission is almost complete. The last piece, XML format, is already done. Our Alpha versions read and write XML.
The dark side of this work was that our fast pace of development seemed to halt. Over the last 18 months we've released just 12 updates and only 4 of those were major.
Now, with the wait and the "under the hood" toil nearly don, the time has come to start gathering the fruits. Over the upcoming months, our development pace will quicken quite significantly. You'll see some hints to that with 2.1.
The other major feature planned for 2.1 is one of the most requested features among Mellel users: an improved Find and Replace. The new find and replace will offer several important new features such as:
* Regular Expressions support: Full support, including all the latest and greatest additions.
* Find and Replace styles and text formatting: For all of you who want to replace Times Bold with Courier Underline, for example.
* Batch Find and Replace "actions": This will allow you to run several Find and Replace actions in a row. A very useful tool for reformatting and editing incoming or outgoing files.
* Saved Find Expressions: This will enable you to save several find expressions you've created, name and add them to a "custom" menu for use later on.
And there's more to 2.1, but on that we shall talk a bit later...
Share your Success -- Imagine, if you will, that you're a novelist (if you are, indeed, you can skip the imagining bit). One day, the great muse of great novels drops for a visit and, as you're such a generous host, decides to stay. That is, you manage to write a very good novel. In fact, a very-very good novel. The critics acclaim, the readers delight, and you're not too unhappy with it either.
As the muse seems to be feeling very comfortable at your house, you decide to take advantage of this opportunity and write another novel. This one seems to do even better than the former. Then you write a third one, and then a fourth. At this point, there seems to be a general agreement that you're the top novelist of your country.
One day, while reading the morning paper, you're surprised to see a story about a new law your country's parliament is mulling over unofficially named "The Equal Greatness Act." The act, goes the parliament member who proposed it, is about sharing and enabling readers.
It goes contrary to one's natural sense of justice when one writer monopolises the whole field of great novels. Our fair country needs more great novelists and more great novels, claims the MP, and since it seems that X (that is, you) has a practical monopoly on great ideas, it is only just that X (you) will share those ideas with others.
If other writers would be able to get some of X's ideas, goes on the MP, they will be able to write great novels too, and this will benefit all of us.
Sounds absurd? To be sure. But this is exactly the same logic that stand behind recent proposals in France and Denmark to force Apple to open up its FairPlay DRM systems.
Apple's iTunes music store allows people to buy music encoded using the FairPlay Digital Rights Management (or DRM) standard. Music files encoded with FairPlay will only play on Apple's iPod music players. The iTunes store and the iPod enhance each other's usefulness for owners: If you buy at iTunes you'd want an iPod to play the music. If you have an iPod, it makes sense to buy music at iTunes.
This "mutual-enhancement" scenario works to Apple's benefit because of one simple fact: Apple makes a better music player and a better music store. People who do not like either, can easily opt to buy another music player and buy music at another internet store.
Apple has only one way to make people use iTunes and iPod: keep making a superior product, so that people will choose and re-choose to use its product. People who use iTunes and iPod are no more "locked" than people who prefer CDs to Vinyl Records are "locked" into using what they prefer to use. They are no more "tied" than people who are forced to come to Denmark or France to visit the Louvre or walk the streets of Copenhagen.
If we drop the cloth of fine words about "opening up," "removing tie-ins" or "enhancing competition" what the proposal really suggest is to punish Apple for making a superior product that users prefer to use and while at it, kill the online music sales business. Have no doubt, once FairPlay and other music formats following it are open for all, they'll be broken by all.
iStupid -- SanDisk, a music players and disk-on-key maker has launched "iDon't," an original anti-iPod campaign to promote its players by bashing the iPod.
The campaign is meant to portray iPod users as idiots or blind followers by comparing them to animals or other creates known as followers or imitators: donkeys, sheep, chimpanzees, ants, androids, etc.
The campaign seems to be going against common advertising and marketing wisdom, to wit: never insult your customers. With iPod world market share at about 75 percent, that's a suicide tactic. Still, making an iChimp poster is a hell of a lot cheaper than making a better music player.
