Mellel's Newsletter #5 contains information about the upcoming Mellel 1.6.7, Davka's special edition of Mellel, a call for localisers, a lengthy report on the status of Windows software emulation and information about an update to AntiWord.
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel Tips:
Mellel News
Mellel 1.6.7 Around the Corner -- You're all fired-up about the upcoming Mellel 1.7, I know, but we had some unsettled business to settle first, ergo, Mellel 1.6.7. This interim release will address one important issue: working with reference management (bibliographic) software.
RedleX has teamed with Sonny Software, the maker of the powerful reference management software Bookends to create an integrated solution for entering citations, scanning and managing references. Among the options offered are:
- Automatic entry of citations into Mellel
- Automatic switching from Mellel to Bookends
- Automatic switch-and-find to Bookends
- Scan & Generate to automatically replace temporary citations with final ones
- Listing of all previously entered citation, with option to double-click to enter the citation
- Automatic generation of bibliography
- Quick-Jump option to quickly jump from a citation in Mellel to the reference in Bookends
- Manual entry of citations (can be "resolved" later in Bookends)
- Quickly navigate to a specific citation or through all the citations in the document
- Convert Text to Citation: to convert old citations to Mellel's format
- Citation editing in Mellel
Davka goes Mellel -- Davka Corporation started distributing a shrink wrap version of Mellel with some text and images of their own under the moniker "Mellel Hebrew Writer." The version contains, in addition to Mellel, the complete Hebrew text of the Bible (in Hebrew and English), text of the "Mishnah" and "Siddur," fonts and graphics from DavkaGraphics clip art collection. The boxed version is priced $79.
Localisation, Anyone? -- Mellel 1.6.5 contains nine different localisations to Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish. That's not enough for us. If you're a Mellel user, a native speaker of a language not included in the above list and, most important, have the willingness to invest the time needed for creating a localised version of Mellel in your language -- write to us at redlex@redlers.com.
The initial localisation requires several hours of work translating text files (actual time depends on how fast you can type). Each version of Mellel requires some additional translation of text strings which usually takes several minutes to complete. The localisation is done in a text editor and do not require any programming knowledge.
What's Going On
Yet Another Windows Emulator -- Ever since Microsoft bought Connectix back in March, the internet is swarming with rumours and speculations about the future of VirtualPC and Windows software emulation on the Mac in general.
To some, the situation is clear: Microsoft has no interest in developing a product that encourages using a Mac. VirtualPC, they speculate, will suffer a slow agonising death through overpricing and underdevelopment. They find some substantiation to their claims in Microsoft's recent announcement that support for G5 processor in VirtualPC will not come until well into 2004.
Others are just as pessimistic, but in the other direction. Microsoft, they ruminate, will use VirtualPC as an excuse to stop developing its Office line of products, offering users to run their Windows counterparts through VirtualPC instead.
Be both speculations justified or not, many are looking around for a VirtualPC replacement. The first and most promising among those seemed to be RealPC, a Windows emulation software by FWB. Although discontinued almost 4 years ago, when RealPC and SoftWindows were purchased from Insignia Software in 1999, FBW claimed RealPC to be in great shape. The first re-released, they promised, will include support for Windows XP and graphic cards that were not supported by VirtualPC and is due "in a matter of weeks."
But then came Microsoft. It seems that FWB struck a deal in the past with Connectix not to develop competing products. Connectix halted its foray into the diagnostic repair tools arena while FWB pledged to discontinue the development of its emulation software. After Connectix was purchased FWB considered the deal annulled and felt itself free to start developing its emulation software again. Microsoft thought differently and requested that FWB remove any references to SoftWindows from its RealPC product line.
This development was played-down by FWB vice president of sales and marketing Mark Prewitt who described the whole matter as a "trademark dispute." Prewitt vowed to issue a "beta" version in July but became somewhat cautious giving details about performance or support for different processors, claiming that this will "depends on how well our beta test goes."
He had reasons to be cautious. A few weeks later FWB experienced a change of mind and heart. On July 17th the old management was replaced and on August 27th Marko Kostyrko the new CEO dropped the bomb: it was all a lie. "we have found that the development had not formally been started," claimed Kostyrko, "and it appears not a single line of code has been written... FWB has not to date even received the source code [for RealPC]... I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vapourware."
From Kostyrko's announcement it seems clear that the actual source code for RealPC was never in the hands of FWB and is apparently still held by Insignia or its successors thereof. This, in combination with the licensing fees (for Windows? For RealPC?) "made the project unattractive," claimed Kostyrko and it was determined "that it is not in the best interests of FWB to go forward with the development of RealPC." Or, in other words, the take-over guys in FWB believe that the product that was not good enough to compete with VirtualPC four years ago is not good enough still.
But that was not the end of the story. Five days after the RealPC bomb was dropped and a small company from Mammoth Lakes, California called OpenOSX announced WinTel 1.0.1, a Windows emulation software touting support for the G5 processor, AltiVec acceleration and emulation of one or two Pentium processors with performance "very similar to VirtualPC."
WinTel is a packaged and slightly modified version of the Open Source project Bochs that enables to emulate different operating systems in UNIX or, in Mac OS X as an X11 application. Performance, by most accounts, is still wanting and certainly not on par with VirtualPC. WinTel is priced from $25 (download version). That's not a lot of money but since Bochs and WinTel are basically the same thing, it is better to download and try the free Bochs before buying WinTel.
A word of warning: both OpenOSX and Bochs are open source sites. That means that no information will be conveyed in humanly legible terms, any sentence will contain at least one horrible grammatical error and download pages will be cryptic, misleading or dated. Be patient.
Mellel Tips
Anti-Word 2.0.1 is Here -- Devon-Technologies have released AntiWord Services 2.0.1. AntiWord is a service that enables opening MS Word .doc files by dragging and dropping them over Mellel's icon. The current version offers slight speed improvements.
