Looks interesting, but I won't buy a writing app if I can't see how well I work with it first. I don't blame developers for wanting to sell through the Apple Store, but they should still offer trial versions for 30 days to give potential users a chance to like them.

This contains the exact feature I was looking for: a display of what's playing. And you can download the app and try before you buy, instead of having to rely on Apple's App Store alone. Great. Price might seem stiff, but given how much time a body would spend with the app, not unreasonable. Unfortunately, while trying it I realized that I am too easily distracted to be safe with such a tool. Guess I'll have to go back to the old-fashioned way of calling up iTunes if I *really* want to know what's streaming. But that's not the app's fault.

Does exactly what it says it will do. Now I can get used to "natural" scrolling on my work computer, which still has Snow Leopard, and I can activate natural scrolling at home. I had been wanting to try this at home, but I didn't want to retrain myself until I could do it on both computers.

By the way, such scrolling makes a lot more sense, even feels "natural", if you're viewing windows without a scrollbar showing.

One crucial missing feature is the ability to zoom text to a larger size on screen. All the fancy formatting options in the world don't help if you have to change formatting to view a document when your formatting was set just the way you needed it to print the document. Of course, you can switch between preset styles for printing and viewing onscreen, but that seems unnecessarily clumsy to me.

I used to use this a lot for my own work. Wrote a dissertation in it, which is a serious commitment to a piece of software, and I wrote this review in ATPM in 2008: . I had Mellel long enough that I had to pay an upgrade once, too. But those of us who paid for it during its early days, hiccups and all, those of us who paid for it twice, in fact, are the ones who are being asked to fork up yet more money in order to have upgrades for life. New customers? They will be treated better, apparently. Quite frankly, this bothers me. Promise of good times in the future, as long as we don't mind being treated unfairly now. No, thank you.

Mellel is certainly worth the money. But the inconsistent treatment and pace of development over the years leaves me disillusioned.

Of course, living without Mellel is easy, since nowadays there is also Nisus Writer Pro, which there wasn't when I was busy with my dissertation. And at work I'm stuck with Word, whether I like it or not, because that's what the others are using who I exchange documents with. So I have learned to live with a crash a day, which I never experienced with Mellel.