| Note: This press release is kept here for legacy purposes. Some of the links may be broken or incorrect. |
For immediate release
RedleX today released Mellel 1.9, a major update to the leading word processor for Mac OS X. Mellel 1.9 offers over 50 new features, including several features not available in any other word processor, and the 5 most requested missing features. The update is free to all registered users of Mellel. A free trial version is available.
Tel Aviv, Israel — March 07, 2005 —
RedleX today released Mellel 1.9, a major update to the leading word processor for Mac OS X.
Mellel 1.9 offers over 50 new features, including several features not available in any other word processor, and the 5 most requested missing features. The update is free to all registered users of Mellel. A free trial version is available.
Mellel introduced in the past several innovations in word processing on the Mac and Mac OS X. Mellel 1.9's main contribution here are style sets, a central hub for designing page, paragraph, character, note, and list in one place. "Our 'global styles' concept was a real breakthrough in its time," says Eyal Redler, CTO at RedleX, "but as Mellel gained ground as a tool for writing long and complex manuscripts and multi-lingual documents our user's feedback started to tell us that it is growing long in the tooth."
Style sets, according to Redler, are flexible enough to fit the needs of many types of users and many types of documents. "You can use them as style-sheets tied to a specific template, as global styles to have a consistent design with many documents or even if you don't want to use styles at all. Style sets fits all those different purposes and work-flows."
Style sets offer some unique advantages, such as the option to move back and forth between style sets (for example, between a "draft" and "print" sets), collaboration where the document looks differently on different machines, but the basic design remains unaltered and controlled by the designer, an option to design the style menus and keyboard shortcuts, and more.
Another important aspect of Mellel 1.9 is filling in the blanks: adding the most requested missing features. "We receive more than two thousand e-mails a month with feature requests from our users", says Guy Hivroni, cofounder and chief GUI designer for Mellel. "With each release, we pick the most requested ones and implement them." With 1.9 those include templates, next paragraph style, an aqua interface option, automatic font and language switching, baseline shift, improved image handling, and more.
What's new in Mellel 1.9:
The new version of Mellel several new features, enhancements, and improvements, in several new areas:
- Style sets
- Templates
- Page style new model
- Image handling
- Interface design
- All the rest
Style sets
- Style sets: This option supports creation of style sets (or "collections") of of styles (page, paragraph, character, note, and list). Style sets can be used globally (with many documents), attached to a template (like style sheets), or to a specific document (like document styles).
- Style editing: completely redesigned style editing windows for page, paragraph, character, note, and list styles, with full control over all the options in the style.
- Changing style sets: You can switch between style sets at any time matching the styles in the different sets by their names or their attributes (or not matching them at all, if you want).
- Style menu editing: you can edit the menus of page, paragraph, character, note, and list styles, adding, deleting, duplicating, attaching keyboard shortcuts and even adding separator bars to menus.
- Dragging between sets: You can drag every style from every style set to construct a new style set, without style duplication.
- Making a style global: Style sets are saved with the document using them, so when you open a document, you can use the styles in the style set and also add them to your collection of style set -- a valuable option for collaborative work.
- Locking style sets: style sets can be locked to prevent unwanted changes being made to styles (they can also be unlocked, of course).
- Templates: You can now open and create special Mellel templates.
Template browser: Allows you to browse the templates (all at once or by category.
Template creation: You can create, edit, delete and update templates. You can also create your own categories of templates by adding a folder inside the templates folder.
Template info and thumbnail: You can add information about every template and even attach a thumbnail of your choice (e.g., you can use a picture of a person for a template used to send that person letters).
Set template as default: You can set your favourite template as the default for new files in the preferences. Just as important -- you can easily change the default here.
- New page model: A new page style model is now attached to the text in the document. This enhanced new model enables you to add pages to each page style range without affecting the style and appearance of pages further along the document. This doesn't prevent you, of course, from still using Mellel's unique ability to have multiple page styles in one document, have several different types of numbering and start-at numbering points.
- First page header/footer: Allows you to set whether the first page in a page range will display the header of footer. This is ideal for a having a first page in a chapter look differently than the other pages, or having a letterhead on the first page of a letter being suppressed with the rest of the pages.
- Auto-adjusted ToC: when you re-generate the Table of Contents (ToC), the page range for the ToC adjusts itself, so it doesn't 'spill over' or inadvertently changes the numbering scheme.
- Insert image: You can now insert images via Insert > Image... in addition to copy and paste and drag and drop.
- Image frame: Inserted images now come in a frame. You can set and change the frame background, colour, line and line weight.
- Scale to fit or float in frame: You can have inserted images scaled to fit the frame (original size) or floating in it. With the second, you can view only a portion of the image and move it within the frame.
- Image scaling: You can scale an image manually, by setting per cent of original size or by setting exact width or height of the image.
- Maintain original proportions: When selected, this option will keep the original proportions (aspect ratio) of the image when resized.
- Resizing handles: The resizing handles for images are now much easier to control and manipulate.
- Improved image appearance: Images with vector graphics in them (e.g., from Adobe Illustrator or OmniGraffle) do not look "fuzzy" anymore.
- Thinner images: Inserted images are now much thinner than before (e.g., TIFF images do not inflate the document).
- Aqua interface: Mellel now supports two "skins" -- brushed Metal and Aqua. You can switch between them through the preferences.
- Re-designed preferences: The preferences system was re-designed (graphically and in content). We've also managed to avoid using the "floppy diskette" for "Open and Save".
- Re-designed style windows: All style windows were re-designed to look more streamlined and easy to work with.
All the rest
- line shift: You can now change the baseline shift (up or down) for text and images. Of note: In contrast with baseline shift with most word processors (especially other Cocoa word processor) changing the baseline shift do not affect the line spacing, so you don't have lines suddenly change their spacing.
- Automatic language switching: Mellel will now automatically switch to the most suitable substitution font for any language you use (no more squares), even if you did not set such a font for writing in a certain language.
- Next paragraph style: In the paragraph style dialogue box you can set the next paragraph style to be used when you press the Return key in the text.
- Highlight font substitution: To spot places where substitution fonts were used, Mellel enables you to highlight cases where such a substitution occurred.
- Start up and switch options: You can now set Mellel's behaviour when you start up the application or switch to it: Do nothing (just show the menus), open a new document (OS X default), or open the templates browser (only when starting up).
- Automatic backup: Mellel now automatically back-up every document you create (including untitled or unsaved documents) into a special backup folder. The backup function separately from the save or automatic save options, so if you accidentally erase something and save the document, you can still recover it from the backup.
- Learn spelling: You can now order Mellel to "Learn" spelling. This was an OS X bug and one of the most requested missing features.
- Propagate list: A new button on the list editing window allows you to populate the list margins, symbol position, indent, char. style and variation values with one stroke.
- More help: The help menu now includes several items to make access to frequently requested options (free fonts, keyboard layouts, tips, buying options), easier.
- Improved Syriac support: Corrected behaviour of unicode range 0x0300->0x036F (combining diacritical marks) with right-to-left scripts. This mainly applies to Syriac, but may be useful with Arabic too.
- Outline promote/demote: A new option now allows you to demote and promote outline items by using the Command+left/right arrow keys.
- Plays nicely with footnotes: Mellel improved the way it integrate with bibliographic database by preserving the styling and formatting of items after the document is 'scanned'.
- Asterisk added: Asterisk was added to the list of list symbols.
- Font detection: Font detection and missing font detection was improved.
- No extra page break please: When inserting a ToC right before a page break or page style break, no additional page break will be added at the end of the ToC.
- Pasting from Mozilla, Firefox, etc.: will now work accurately (This is a Gecko engine bug, actually, but we've fixed it anyhow).
- Delete next word: Option+Delete will now delete the next word.
- Opening the preferences: Cmd+, will now open the Preferences.
- Misbehaving characters: Degree sign, ohm, micro, angstrom etc. following numbers in RTL text behave correctly in this version.
- Spell faster: When writing gibberish (e.g., typing at 300 words a minute) Mellel will not skip words if spell as you type is activated.
- Updated Guide and help: the Guide was updated to reflect the changes in Mellel 1.9.
- And bug fixes: About a hundred bugs you never knew existed were fixed.
About Mellel
Mellel is an advanced, multilingual word processor for Mac OS X. Mellel offers many sophisticated and innovative word processing features, many of which cannot be found with other word processors and many more planned for the next few months.
Pricing and Availability
Mellel can be purchased for just US$39. To purchase Mellel go here.
For details about other purchasing options to here.
About RedleX
RedleX was founded in 2002 by Eyal Redler, Ori Redler and Guy Hivroni. The company is privately held and headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Press Contacts:
For general press-related information about Mellel and RedleX go to: http://www.redlers.com/newspresscentre.html
Email: press@redlers.com
|
|
