![]() If it suits your work then you can buy it from there or via the Mac App Store for $59.99. Get the 30-day trial of the Mac version direct from the developer's website to take a look. Mellel isn't as smooth and slick as Word or Pages but it is a strong academic writing tool. When you're not an existing user, though, the decision is harder. If you're an existing Mellel user then it's so worth grabbing the new version that you should have downloaded it already - go get it without a moment's hesitation and look forward to the reported 95 new features. If you're submitting to a publisher, they may already have indexers they use, so this isn't as handy a feature as it might be but anything might help the process if you're flying solo is worth grabbing. Indexing is a brutal job for a writer and enough so that there are people who specialize in doing so for us. ![]() Currently it won't and you can't edit it directly: you instead periodically re-do the table of contents as you go.Ĭuriously, the new indexing feature in Mellel 4 does update as you go. Specifically, it would be good if the Table of Contents could update itself as you add new sections to your work. These are little touches and there are bigger ones we'd like for both versions of Mellel 4. We kept clicking once to select and wondering why it wasn't doing anything. On the Mac where you can have a palette of styles or text attributes open, you currently have to double-click to select one on the iPad. To select a word you have to double-tap it and to select anything else you then must drag the selection handles. Similarly, pressing and holding on text does pop up the regular iOS options bar but it only includes Select All, not just Select by itself. The most we could do was select word by word. Also, using an external keyboard, we couldn't quickly select from the cursor to the start or end of the current line as you can on the Mac. At the moment we were unable to create or edit styles on it, for instance. We would like to see the iPad version be developed further, though. The ability to write on Mac or iPad and then to continue your work on either machine too, it's practically essential for a word process or text editor today. The fact that the app is on the iPad and has now been updated to better match the Mac version is superb, though. That's even true with the Mellel 4 for iPad edition which is a much newer product. However, when we skipped between Mellel and its rivals like Word, Scrivener, Ulysses and Pages, we feel that Mellel's icons are over-sized and basic. That's not necessarily a bad thing - the research tool and the scriptwriting apps are hugely successful. During the course of our evaulation, we were reminded of apps like DEVONthink and Final Draft. Subjectively, even in this new version Mellel feels old and like an academic product. But, Microsoft's word processor does look and feel more modern - and yes, that is probably the first time that has ever been said on AppleInsider. We might also prefer Mellel's simpler toolbar next to the way Word buries controls under barely predictable tabs in its Ribbon. That all said, once you know how Mellel works, you do find that it needs fewer steps to accomplish certain tasks. But, the app itself wasn't much help to deduce that. We learned that from the developer's website which has an excellent series of help videos on it. The answer to the problem is to use what Mellel calls Auto-Titles. For instance, you might mark a heading as being in the Title style but the Table of Contents feature won't recognize it. There are also confusing points in Mellel. There is still a great deal of depth in Mellel so you won't pick up its every nuance much faster than you might grasp Word's. We had no crashes or problems during our use but cumbersome is harder to define. Specifically that it isn't cumbersome nor prone to crashing. The developer and fans of Mellel might point you to different features, but they will also all point out how it isn't Microsoft Word.
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