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:
Mellel 2.1 is here -- And 2.1.1 too, as a matter of fact. Since you can get the latest and greatest anyhow, I'll keep the babbling about what's in those new versions to a minimum:
- Advanced Find and Replace: We've implemented full support for Regular Expressions (only with a more humane interface) and then added the option to find and replaces styles and formatting.
- XML format: Mellel now uses XML as its native file format. That means that files are now smaller and much more approachable to convertors and easy retrieval of information.
- Full Screen: Now gloriously supported.
- Paragraph and character palettes: Those allow you to manage your styles via a palette. No new options here, but more convenient.
- Paste Special: You can now paste text as plain text or simply paste character, paragraph or list attributes.
- And more: In the Release Notes page.
What's ahead -- Our next major release, Mellel 2.2, is planned for release late this year (we haven't decided yet exactly how late). The main event with this release will be a big push toward a very much improved referencing system. We wouldn't get into details this time, as part of this is not yet implemented, but we can promise that many of the changes will be significant and fill the blanks with several of our most requested features.
We also plan to release some mini-versions on the way to 2.2. Those will mainly include smaller features and additions from our most-requested list. .
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 Update thing -- When we first released Mellel, in August 2002, we promised "three years of free updates." We delivered on our promise: All Mellel updates up to version 2.0.8 were free updates. Mellel 2.1, released late in August 2006, was our first for-pay udpdate. That is, people who purchased Mellel before September 2003 now need to purchase an update to continue to use newer versions of Mellel. The update, by the way, costs just 19 USD.
What does this mean? Simply put, it means that you need to check before you install. After downloading Mellel, before installing it over an older version, you should run it to see if you need to purchase an update. If the new version simply runs without asking you any questions, then all is fine and you can install the new version over the older one and continue as usual.
If Mellel does announce that you need to purchase an update, you have two choices:
A. Click the Purchase Update button and, well, purchase the update. You'll get the renewed registration code almost immediately.
B. Quit the new version and continue to use the older version.
Monday? Is it Monday already? -- Yes, it is. Go out and look around in MacUpdate. You might find something rather interesting there... And it's a one-day thing, so Tuesday would not do.
No Go, No Live -- Adobe announced that GoLive will be booted out of the next version of Adobe Creative suite. Adobe announced, somewhat cryptically, that it "will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone product." This has an all too familiar ring to it, and the bells tolling aren't the morning bells, nor is the ring a wake up call. Well, OK, it is a kind of a wake.
The news did not surprise many. GoLive was going nowhere, and once Adobe purchased Macromedia and with it DreamWeaver the writing on the wall was quite clear. Still, from a designer's point of view, it is sad news and, to some extent, a step backwards.
No V, No B, No VBA -- Slightly less saddening (because I did not use either, probably) are the news about the rather timely demise of VirtualPC and VBA.
The first is simply a "but of course." VirtualPC had no real use with the new Intel based Macs. Parallel, BootCamp, and other products (e.g., the one from VMware) run Windows software at almost native speed. No one needed VirtualPC anymore.
The second is more interesting. VBA -- short for Visual Basic for Applications is the scripting lingo used in MS Office products on both Mac and PC. On the face of it, it seemed like an unwise decision by Microsoft, booting out a component that enables cross-platform script-ability and script-ability between Office application.
Erik Schwiebert, a developer at the Microsoft Buisness Unit (Mac BU) explained why in one short and another longish post in his blog. The short explanation was that MS Office is moving to XCode, the latest development environment for Mac and VB simply did not make the cut. The longer one tried to detail why: the VB code was too old (he points to 1992 as the creation date) to port to XCode.
That's too bad for MS Office users, and especially corporate folks who use Excel, but also to some others. Schwiebert claimed that "There is no other software on the Mac that also uses VB," but he was wrong. Applications such as EquationEditor and Endnote do and, at least for the latter, this support is quite critical.
It looks like an important fork in the road is coming for all three, at least with academia folks.
iQuit -- Last time we discussed SanDisk's rather daft "iDon't" anti-iPod campaign. Apparently, the people at SanDisk were quite quick to spot that the revolution is going nowhere and scrapped their 'grassroot' pseudo-counter-culture campaign. The iDon't site now ungracefully re-directs you to their pseudo-hip site advertising their e200 player. The e200, by the way, is your typical iPod clone.
