RedleX is a small, privately held company located in Tel Aviv, Israel. RedleX was co-founded by Eyal and Ori Redler and Guy Hivroni.
The following story of RedleX is an unadulterated waste of time, written especially for those who can afford to waste it. It's also not necessarily true. You've been warned.
(If you're interested in mundane but useful stuff like support, click one of the links on the right)
It all began one day in November 2001. We were sitting in our private jet, sipping overpriced champagne, living la vida pseudo-loca, and pondering where our whim will take us next. Buying medium-size countries was our latest fad, but that proved to be a rather tiresome and lengthy procedure. The folks in those medium-size countries can be really pesky, if they set their mind to be so.
At some point one of us (we still argue who who he was) had a brain-storm: what if we try to write a word processor? The other one (we still argue who he was too) thought about it for a moment, and then Homer Simpsoned: Mmmm, Word Processor.
It made sense. At that point, Mac OS X was a little more than a charming toy, but it had two important lures for software makers: a free development environment (which Apple touted as speeding the development time tenfold), and a relatively empty playing ground.
Several key software developers have already announced their "commitment" to the platform, which in software-making lingo meant that they'll bother with Mac OS X if and when it catches on. Meanwhile, the development arena included just a handful of leftover companies from the NeXT days, and a bunch of new, small developers like us, fiddling around with what OS X had to offer. We felt we really have a chance to make a dent, or at least a dimple.
We've decided to enter the fray.
Our initial idea was to create our own text engine, and combine it with stuff offered by Mac OS X. We considered using Mac OS X generic text engine for about five minutes, and decided that we really shouldn't. It felt as if we'll be knee-high in trouble in no-time trying to force this engine to do what it wasn't meant to do.
Writing your own text engine sounds ambitious, but it really wasn't. Not at first, anyway. Word processing has always been the bread and butter of working with a computer, but with Mac OS X the butter was spread thinner than the book of non-EPO taking pro-cyclists. Even the most modest of efforts would have secured us a place in the top five word processors for X. We had nothing to lose.
On January 19, 2002, Mellel 1.0 was released. This version was, well, scruffy. The application icon was a hack, and so was the graphic user interface. We didn't mind: Mellel could do very little anyhow. except align the text left, right, and centre.
By May 2002, we already progressed to version 1.2. Now we had a new icon (still ugly) and an exciting addition: character styles. The "preferences" still looked funny with only two options. We still hang on to our day jobs (flight attendants in private jet planes). Mellel was then still a free product.
Version 1.2.5 came and went in June and by August 7, 2002 we were ready to start our cash registers. Our latest version, Mellel 1.3 was a 'real' word-processor. It had a ruler, margins, paragraph styles, zoom, cute little drawers, and a totally new toolbar with totally new makeshift icons. We thought it was worth the $12 we've asked for it. Others felt the same: we had 16 registered users in just under four days. We felt exhilarated!
The next few versions added some neat stuff (tabs, headers, footers, page styles, etc.), which was peachy and sometimes even peary, but the application itself still looked kind of dingy. Finally, one of us (we never argue who he was) decided to call Guy Hivroni. A GUI designer by profession, inclination, and hobbyation, Guy is the kind of guy you'd call in the middle of the night in case of a GUI emergency.
Guy promised to help, just for laughs and for a stake in our part-time venture. He thought we'll never be able to pay him anyhow (by that time we were making billions and billions of dollars, but we thought it wise not to tell him about that too early. Thinking about billions and billions of dollars can really disturb one's concentration and we wanted Guy to be focused!)
Mellel 1.4, released on December 16, 2002 was a totally different application. To start, Guy delivered on his promised with a new interface and icon. Second, we now had a really good note (footnotes, endnote) system. We got rid of the drawers almost completely (they were simply rotten), but Mellel was still quirky in some respects. When you opened the Edit style window, for example, the style palette (like the character or paragraph palette) would suddenly pop and stick to its side. When you moved the window around, the palette would follow it around like a cute little quirky puppy.
We didn't spend a lot of time pondering about this. We were now cooking new versions at a furious pace. We had three small releases out in a space of a month and then, on March 11, 2003, were ready with Mellel 1.5. This one had tables, and we were particularly proud of being able to create the feature in little under six weeks. The whole thing still cost just $19.
That said, we still kept the silly habit of adding too many new features which each small release. Mellel 1.5.5, for example, had 16 of those. We could have named it Mellel 2.0 just the same.
Mellel 1.6, released June 24, 2003, was the next big thing. We've added support for Persian and Arabic (CJK support was added earlier on) and raised the price to $25. People started noticing us... but wandered why we're not numbering the version 2.0 instead of 1.6.
We promised ourselves never to get back to our bad habits of having tons of features in a small release, but immediately broke our promise. We had 7 "small" releases in six months, including major features like RTF support, typographer quotes, Bookends collaboration, and so on.
All that didn't matter when 1.7 came, early in January 2004. It was kind of overshadowed by the Macworld Expo, but we didn't mind. 1.7, we thought, includes such and exiting array of new innovations that it'll get noticed anyhow.
We were wrong. The main new features of 1.7, auto-numbering, ToC, mentions, etc. were exciting stuff, but as it turned out, they all needed some time to "sink in." We were a bit naïve, perhaps, thinking that a new, innovative and complex feature, would be immediately recognised for what it's worth.
Mellel 1.7.5, in April 2.004, included a much improved RTF export and import, numbered and bulleted lists, and a "style brush" and was much more palatable to our users. It was a huge hit for us. We weren't yet in a position to bid for buying Microsoft, but were now able to lay our grubby hands on some Microsoft memorabilia on eBay. It took us some $15.93 back, but it was totally worth it. You simply gotta love them folks at Microsoft. They have such a good sense humour!
Anyway... Where were we? September 2004, and Mellel 1.8. Again, we thought that the most important feature in this release was our OpenType support, which allowed folks to do some pretty neat stuff with text, and especially text in non-Roman languages.
Again, we were wrong. Most of the billions and billions of new users thought that the most important feature was our Outline feature. We aim to please, so we did not argue, just started considering long document writing much more seriously.
While stewing Mellel 1.9 fairly slowly, several things started happening. To start, we've noticed that several of our competitors (for now, three years into Mac OS X land, there appeared some) are shamelessly copying the smart advertising and marketing ploys we have shamelessly copied from others earlier on. This made us strangely happy. Imitation is the most sincerest form of flattery, and this piece of flattery told us that at least some of our competitors think we are doing something right here.
Mellel 1.9 was released on March 2005. The two big features there were style sets and templates, but we also had around 50 other features, which contributed to a smoother user experience. Mellel 1.9.1, with minor improvements, came in May and then, for the first time, our users had to face a long wait.
Mellel 2.0 was initially planned for August. It was not to be. The major features planned for this version, especially columns, keep with and widows and orphans, but also hyphenation, had serious implications regarding the way Mellel works. In order to add those, we had to either improvise (that is, provide features that work most of the time with a marked slow-down) or re-write parts of the application to provide the new features and actually speed things up. We opted for the latter, and re-writing about 40 per cent of Mellel from scratch proved to be a lengthy process, especially since Mellel was now a much more complex beast.
Mellel 2.0 was released eventually in November 2005. It was a major change and a huge success. We gained millions (and I'm talking cents here!)
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