Quite simply put: Horrible. Nothing like any Mac app I've seen (even since the early 90s). This is an application gone horribly awry. In my endeavor to find a better way to write, this app is among the worst if not THE worst. Stability? That of a pickle as a support column. Manual? Ha! Interface? You'd be better off using vi at the command line. Nothing to see here, move on.

This is not an interface. This is a window riddled with buttons. If you want a real application, Hog Bay Notebook and DevonNote will do the trick. If you have money to just throw around, Ulysses will also work. This looks like a college project. I clicked "new chapter" and was offered to create a new chapter named, and then a blank space. I'm still not sure if anything actually happened. Next.

I think this is a great program. I have tried them all, from Mellel to Z-write, and
Manuscript demonstrates an acute understanding of how the creative mind works. Within 30 minutes of downloading it, I basically had the whole thing figured out, which is truly remarkable for a computer idiot such as myself. The notes drawer and autosave are great. As someone who sits in front of a computer way too much, I gotta tell you the simplicity of the ease by which you can magnify the text as well as the brownish tone of the background on the main page are a godsend to my overworked eyes. You can adjust the color, but I found the brown tone worked the best for me. And, at the risk of sounding like a simpleton, let me tell you my favorite feature. Writers spend way too much time alone. So there I was, typing, and I clicked on the button that enables your work to be read aloud to you, as a joke mind you, but after I got past the robotic sounding voice, I was hooked. I always write to rhythms in my head, but now I could actually hear whether or not what I was writing was working, rhythmically. You can also highlight a section and it will read only that passage, something I discovered accidentally, and I think maybe that should be mentioned in the help text somewhere. Anyway, it has made writing for me more of an interactive experience. Try it and see what I mean. As Einstein once said, “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” The artfulness of this program lies in its beautiful simplicity.

Many nice small touches have been added. As someone with vision problems, I appreciate being able to write text in large print, then formatting in a separate window. While this will not do for the layout obsessed , for those with straightforward text needs, this is a remarkable tool.
It is still a BETA, but I experienced no stability problems. The faint line between the notes pane and the text pane is a welcome addition. My only wish is that the author would allow the user to individually hide/reveal the button bar, the notes pane, and the category fields to permit maximum dedication of the screen to text.
A small criticism is that the layout of the control buttons seems rather haphazard. A layout in a single line would appear to be suitable (and take up less space). Not a killer issue, by any means.
If you have serious control/layout issues, buy Framemaker, If you are writing straight text (no footnotes ) such as school reports, fiction or magazine articles this is a tool that shows a great deal of promise. All it needs is integration with a bibliography program, a spell checker, and a thesaurus to have appeal for the academic market.