Inspirational Technology

Another Cocoa Word Processor

Just came across another Cocoa word processor called Mellel. Looks like it's been around for a while, but I'd never seen it before. It falls into the abuse the metal interface catagory and is in clear violation of Apple's UI guidelines in this regard (but so is Safari, so who knows what the guidelines are now). However, regardless of what the guidelines say this interface actually looks pretty slick. The program seems to work a little different then the norm, but that's definitely not a bad thing if it can also work better. I still don't have any real need for a word processor, but this looks like another decent alternative for a basic solution. The price is only $19 which is a real bargain compared to many of the alternatives.

One major complaint, the file format is binary with an embedded property list. This is the age of XML, and any modern program should either have an easy way to store it's data in XML or better, simply use XML for its native file format. I'm extremely hesitant to rely on any software where I can't understand the file format from the perspective of easily repurposing the data. It seems Apple is starting to get this idea (i.e. iTunes and iPhoto making XML duplicates of their DBs and the Keynote file format), it's time that other people developing for the Mac did too. This particular program can export RTF and plain text, but no XML. Of course Apple could make things easier in this regard by providing something that resembled decent XML support in the Cocoa frameworks.