A couple of days ago I got too fed up with AppleWorks to continue using it willingly. Once upon a time it had mastered all its trades economically and effectively; I felt as though I really was working smarter, not harder, when I used ClarisWorks. A version or two ago, the suite started to falter, and the Carbonized version of AppleWorks runs clunkily under OS X, giving the distinct sense that it’s a massive kludge. Now I feel as though using AppleWorks makes me work dumber and harder. Pfaugh!
So a couple of days ago I decided to register Mellel and make it my daily writing app. I had liked some of its features when I first met it; specifically, Mellel makes choosing typefaces simple, and makes paragraph and character styles convenient. I didn’t stick with it, though; it lingered in my Applications folder, but I hardly ever opened it. It didn’t pass the tipping point of application allegiance.
Well, color me tipped. In fact, I am so far beyond the tipping point that it would take a massive failing, a cataclysmic mismatch with my working needs, to attenuate my enthusiasm for Mellel. I keep finding new aspects of the application to admire. I hover over a button, and the label tells me about a convenience I would never have anticipated. I click on a palette, and I find exactly what I would hope for, where I would look for it. Styles — which have always involved undue complications in every word processor I’ve ever used — work clearly, intelligibly, and smoothly here. And Mellel’s programmers are hard at work fine-tuning, improving, and polishing it. I can’t help loving this word processor, and that’s even without using its tremendously powerful Hebrew-language capacities.
If I had Steve Jobs’s ear, or Bill Gates’s, I would buy Mellel for double what the Redlers team asked for it — they’d still come out ahead. This is one sweet word processor, and I urge every Mac user to grab it while it’s still a steal at $25.
Posted by AKMA at November 15, 2003 04:58 PM | TrackBackMy favorite part is still styles. And how the program is so writing focused. It doesn't distract from writing like other word processor do. It just wants me to type words so it can format them for me. You can paste graphics into it, you know, so you can draw in another application and pronto you've got a figure in mellel. once they have it lined up with bookends ...
Posted by: Trevor Bechtel at November 15, 2003 09:47 PMMellel is really the only logical choice if you want to write in Hebrew on Mac OS X. I find its right-to-left writing feature rather handy. There's even an optional free Hebrew spell check program you can download. If you're used to AppleWorks or Microsoft Word X, Mellel takes awhile to get used to. However, I like the fresh and new approach to word processing the creator(s) of Mellel have taken.
Posted by: Jorge Quiñónez at December 1, 2003 04:54 PMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Emmett at January 13, 2004 12:52 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Manasses at January 13, 2004 12:52 AMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Valentine at January 13, 2004 12:52 AMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Josias at January 13, 2004 09:55 AMSeth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
Posted by: Samuel at January 13, 2004 09:55 AMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Erasmus at January 13, 2004 09:55 AM