Word Processing follow-up

After writing my complaint about Word and word processing on Mac OS X, I decided to do “yet another” search for something to quell my angst. What I found suprised me. Pleasantly.

First, LyX has been Aqua-fied. Sort of. I found a non-X11 distribution of LyX which apparently uses Qt-Mac for it’s widgets. It’s nice: I have lots of LyX documents lying around I can now open and edit with ease. Of course, it’s still obviously not a first-class Mac citizen: keyboard shortcuts and file dialogs look totally wrong. That and, well, embarassingly enough, you can’t really print. Well, maybe some people can, but I couldn’t after an hour of fiddling, and really, that’s about all I can devote to it right now.

My other find is what really knocked my socks off. Mellel is a shareware word processor, and with a price tag of $29USD, it’s absolutely amazing. OK, so it doesn’t import or export to Word, but it has an amazing set of features and doesn’t feel bloated or slow in the least. What’s more, it’s obviously built for Mac OS X, and as such has the typography and layout controls we’ve come to expect. After using it to write a short curriculum guide this morning, I shelled out the purchase cost without hesitation.

To anyone looking for a real alternative for your personal word processing, I can’t recommend Mellel enough. It’s right there with OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner now in my “must-have” pile.