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Mellel 1.9, a special Mellel + Bookends offer, some hints about Mellel 2.0, and a the Mac is Back (or is it?)
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel News
Mellel 1.9 is out -- It's out and about, and if you don't mind us saying so, it's great. Mellel 1.9 includes more than 50 new features and improvements -- easily the most extensive and exciting update ever. Even more important, most of the new options are useful. Here are the main highlights:
- Templates: Mellel 1.9 offers built in template support. All the usual features are there, with the added nicety of allowing you to set the "thumbnail" for the template yourself so that if you want to have your picture on your favourite template, you can easily add it to the template.
- Style sets: This feature perhaps the most exciting and the least understood feature in Mellel 1.9. Style sets are collections of paragraph, character, page, list, and note styles. Style sets allow you to organise your styles similar to the way you can arrange image or song collections. But style sets are much more than just a means to set your styles in order. In essence, they provide you with the perfect solution for just about every possible workflow: stylesheets, templates, global styles, ad-hoc changes, etc.
- Image handling: OK, Mellel sucked here. Now it sucks much less. You can insert images via the Insert menu, change their size easily and accurately (percent or exact measurements), have the image floating (cropped) in a frame, frame borders, and so on. And, lest we forget, images don't inflate the document.
- Aqua interface: For all of those who hated the brushed metal interface...
- New page model: The new and improved page model is now tied to the text, not to the page. This means, for example, that when you add a page to a chapter, the page styles applied will "stretch" to apply to this added page too.
- And much more: For example -- Next paragraph style, baseline shift, automatic backup, start-up options, font substitution, etc.
Mellel + Bookends = More for Less -- We're at it again, and this time with a special offer for students to purchase both Mellel and Bookends for just $79. That's a 45 percent discount over (or, rather, under) the regular price and even 20 percent cheaper than the student pricing for both products.
And some hints about the upcoming 2.0 -- Let's start with the good news: Mellel 2.0 will be free to registered users of Mellel. If you buy now, you would need to pay then.
That doesn't mean that Mellel 2.0 will not be a significant update. To the contrary -- if 1.9 was a major update, 2.0 will be a super-major update, with major advances on all fronts: layout, work and format.
Perhaps the most significant change, at least from most users' point of view, will be the addition of columns. This feature is long overdue, but we'll compensate for the wait with some very exciting options there. Taking care of columns, we'll also take care of several things that 'come with the territory, so to say, such as widows and orphans control and keep with options. Ah, and hyphenation too.
Another important change, perhaps even more important in the 'grand scheme of things' will be changing the Mellel file format to XML. For most of you XML is a YATMAN -- Yet Another Acronym That Means Absolutely Nothing -- so I'll explain: XML is a file format in which the document content and the styling and formatting info are saved as plain text. This means that even 30 year from now and even if you don't have Mellel then (Unlikely! You'll always use Mellel!) you'd be able to open the files and retrieve the content easily. The XML format will also make it very easy to manipulate Mellel files, read them even without Mellel, save the rain forests, and so on.
What's Going On
A whiff of something -- Something is definitely changing. The numbers are not there yet, but you can scent the change: The Mac is back.
It started with Mac OS 10.3 -- Panther. While slowly losing its grip over its traditional stronghold, the publishing industry, the Mac started to gain ground elsewhere. With the computer industry slowly slowing down and changing into a 'mature' sector, a growing number of people started to seek a machine that will not only "do the job" but will also be pleasurable to use. As long as you think you're going to leave the room in five minutes, you can sit on an upend bucket. The minute you discover that you're going to wait there for a while, you start looking for a real chair. Your computer is a work tool you want to enjoy using, not a virus infested torture chair. People are starting to respond to that fact.
A "windows switcher" was a real rarity up until two years ago. Nowadays, it's almost run-of-the-mill to meet a person in a Mac forum claiming that s/he intend to switch or have just switched and wants to know how move their computer estate to their new Mac.
Again, no numbers, just a whiff of a change.
And it's not an iPod related phenomenon either. The iPod is contributing to Apple's bottom line. The iTunes store is chipping in too. But whether the 'halo effect' theory will work here remains to be seen. the iPod will certainly contribute to people being more open to buy a Mac, but no one can tell how much of this openness will translate into sales.
And it's not a Mini Mac phenomenon either. The Mini Mac is certainly a boon to many existing Mac users, especially in cheap server functions. Anything more than that? It still remains to be seen.
The feeling, however, is that it is neither the Mac Mini nor the iPod but something else. It's not the success of a new product or a smart marketing ploy by Apple that will bring a significant change -- only the need for a change can bring a real change. Here, it seems, the Mac stands a good chance to have a real comeback.
The test for the change will be how 2005 turns out. If Apple sells around 3.5 Million Macs this year -- this was a false alarm. From there to 4 Million Macs, the Jury will be hang. 4 and more -- and we can say it openly: the Mac is back.
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