LEV  I don't know why I find this "review" a bit irritating but I bet I've written more books and articles than he has. And that means that I am a better person, so what I have to say is that I really dislike the apps I don't like, which proves their developers are a Bore and should brace up and do what I want, and that's what I say so it's true, and that's how it is and there you have it. Got that? Good. That's all for Introduction to Critical Thinking 1.01 today. Class dismissed.  
(Version 2.0.3)

LEV  Been using Screenwriter for many years and v6 is a big jump ahead of the previous version (Screenwriter 2000). It's not without its frustrations but I find it a more robust and congenial tool than its only real rival, Final Draft. (Celtx and Montage are both coming along, but I'd not yet trust real live work to them. Yet...)

Screenwriter's strengths are, first of all, in its transparency. The only point of a screenwriting app is to get out of your way. Swapping fretting about formatting styles for fretting about your writing app is obviously no progress at all, and my experience is that Screenwriter is a bit less noticeable in use than Final Draft. Of course, Final Draft devotees may say the same thing about FD; it's maybe what you're used to that counts.

Screenwriter's foolishly-named "NaviDoc" is actually a very useful, very powerful outliner with total control over what is visible, what prints, and so on. Move the outline item and the script passages associated with it move too. The nearest comparison is the Mellel outliner. Screenwriter seems more robust, too. There's not that faint walking-on-eggshells I get with FD. Purely subjective but there it is.

Screenwriter is also much better at making sense of cut-and-paste or imported RTF files, which may or may not be of use to you. ***CAVEAT***: both FD and Screenwriter get completely confused if you import/paste anything using the SHOT element. Lord knows why. Final Draft 8 has the "FD Exchange format" which solves the problem; unfortunately Screenwriter can't export to that (though the brilliant Scrivener can).

On the downside, Screenwriter is less "Mac-like" than FD 8. Every time I fire it up (most days) I think: Lord, but this is fugly. But it's like an old Land Rover: may look crufty on the outside, but you forget about that once you're one the move and, instead, just enjoy its reliability. Screenwriter isn't as good as FD for reformatting -- going through an (imported, perhaps) script making sure all the elements are properly assigned. Creating a new element (I'm working with a LYRIC element a lot at the moment) is less intuitive with Screenwriter. And, like FD, it won't let you rename standard elements -- which can be a pain, frankly. Stage plays use "internal" and "external" direction, and it would be nice to be able to call your elements by those names instead of trying to remember that ACTION is now being used for INT DIRECTION.

FInal Draft is touted as the Hollywood "industry standard". Not really true, and shouldn't really be a major factor in your choice. PDF is the most usual way of transferring stuff, and if you get to the point where a producer/director wants a script in the other format to the app you have, there are plenty of ways around it.

For a standalone writing environment, then, Screenwriter, for me, wins easily. For a fine working combination, preliminary work in Scrivener and "final draft" in FInal Draft is probably hard to beat. I hope we'll get the same level of interoperability between Scrivener and Screenwriter one day.

In the meantime, it's worth remembering that obsessing about formatting minutiae is probably a displacement activity. (I'm as prone to it as the next guy. We're tool-using animals, after all.) The truth is, no screenplay which tells a good story and tells it well is ever going to be rejected because the Transitions are 5mm too far from the right margin...

In short, there's no screenwriting app which does everything. All of them have weaknesses; all of them have irritating "strengths" where they'll try their hardest to impose their will on the hapless writer. But for a robust heavy-lifting app with good production features and good links to scheduling apps etc., Screenwriter takes some beating.  
(Version 6.0.5.140)

LEV  SUMNERG, I think you may find that your concerns about both Unicode and Universal Binary are being addressed at this very moment... (No affiliation with the developers, merely a happy user with his ear close to the ground.)  
(Version 4.7.1)

LEV  Just fired up PowerStructure to solve a narrative problem, first time for years. It still works. But it looks /very/ clunky nowadays. No updates in five years = abandonware, I guess.  
(Version 1.8)

LEV  And the many. many reasons are...? Help us out here.  
(Version 1.2.3)

LEV  Um... so if you won't buy from M$-style corporate gougers and you won't buy from small software houses, what are you actually going to run on your computer? You do /have/ a computer, don't you?  
(Version 5.2.1 beta 1)

LEV  Very helpful. Thanks for all your time and effort in communicating your thoughts.   
(Version 1.7.3)

LEV  FD8 isn't so bad. It does its stuff and it's easier to set up new script elements than Screenwriter. ( I'm working on a musical at the moment, which needs a LYRIC element. In FD it's a snap. In Screenwriter you have to set up an "outline element" which isn't quite so well-behaved, though it does work.)

BUT... beware. The activation system will dump you like a shot if e.g. you have a system crash and reinstall, or (as I did) you upgrade to Snow Leopard then have to roll back because SnoLe isn't really ready to print with your new HP printer (tsk). The assumption is that all users are (a) in the ConUS, (b) have an internet connection and (c) aren't doing anything particular much that day in the way of work so can wait for a support dude to reset the damn registration database.. They can do what they like, but it's annoying for the user who, as I am, is on a little Greek island trying to get some work done in peace. Thankfully I'm only using FD to read/revise someone else's work. Screenwriter is a bit more elegant in its approach. Not much; but they've at least automated the process so you don't have to make two trips into town to get the software you've paid for working again.

I don't actually understand the reasoning, really. If you're a pro, you're going to buy the software because you need it. If you're not a pro, I can't see anyone popping $250 for a highly-specialised app, although they will certainly bootleg it to sit in their rooms pretending they're Bill Goldman. But I presume they have their reasons.

Oh, one heads-up. Lord Lightning mentioned integration with Scrivener. Which is wonderful if you're using standard screenplay format. On the current job, I'm not, and Scrivener (which is marvellous) and FD don't really understand what each other are doing. That pesky LYRIC element causes mutual incomprehension. I expect the brilliant Keith Blount will fix it in Scrivener but for the moment it's no go.  
(Version 8.0)

LEV  Afraid I don't really get this "snappy Finder" compliment everyone's paying to SnoLe. I can't tell the difference. Perhaps I'm just too coarse-grained... but there is one little thing which annoys the hell out of me apart from the HP printer driver snafu, and that's Services. Yes, all well and good, but in System Preferences when you select which Services to activate you get NO WAY to tell which application "owns" which Service. "Make new clipping"? Yes, but to /what/? In the Services menu itself you get a little app icon, but that's a bit late in the day.

Not sure I like the was SnoLe apparently deprecates contextual menus, either. What with the various other little problems, SnoLe has scribbled up my workflow more than any previous point update, so it's rollback for me. First time I've ever done it. Lord, the shame.  
(Version 10.6.1)

LEV  @ STILL_SPARKLING: It's not that SnoLe doesn't support an old printer. It's that it says it DOES support it. By your argument, we shouldn't trust anything Apple says until we have personally verified it. Which may be a good point... I, too, have had to roll back to Leopard from SnoLe for the same reason. In this case the printer was 8 months old. I'm also not sure, forgive me, that I buy the "everyone knows HP drivers are flaky" argument. Again, it assumes that you need specialist knowledge to do what should be a simple consumer buying choice.

On my experience SnoLe is kind of okay but I'm putting it in a drawer and waiting for 10.6.3, I think.  
(Version 10.6.1)

LEV  Re short cuts: For all OS X apps you can go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts and set shortcut keys either for individual apps or globally.  
(Version 1.2.4b3)

LEV  Well well. And to think I never knew that DevonThink was cobbled together by Silesian elves from old time-expired sheep components which would disintegrate like at the end of Lost Horizon once they'd sucked in ALL YOUR DATA and then you NEVER BE ABLE TO USE IT AGAIN. I thought they were a small but meticulous dev shop which produced a really fine everything-manager of great power, albeit with a slightly crufty front end, and that they were taking a while to make a major integer release.

Come on, fella. If you don't have facts, don't print the story. You're just ticking off (and -- it's a legal term -- defaming a company for reasons which are beyond me. And you're also ticking off MU users who don't like being told what to to unless we get good reasons. Come back with good reasons and welcome. For now, hold it right there...

(Move along people. Nothing to see here. Move along.)  
(Version 2.0b5)

LEV  For those who can't be bothered to look up Ronaldjohn's comments on the Leap entry, his tantrum is because something appears to be going a bit amiss with his Leap installation.

This in his mind makes the developers not only incompetent but malign, and probably indicates they're doing it on purpose to upset his productivity. Probably thinks his doctor's trying to kill him, too.

Deep is cool and useful. Leap ditto. Yep ditto. I have no connection with Ironic other than as a user.  
(Version 1.1.1)

LEV  It would be nice if everything were free. And a Lexus is really just a souped-up Suzuki Swift...

Actually I don't think putting Scrivener and Ulysses head to head is quite right. I've used both since they first appeared and I still use both. Scrivener is a brilliant free-form organizer with some very sophisticated writing tools; Ulysses encourages a more disciplined approach. To be glib, Scrivener is for feeling your way forward, Ulysses is for managing a writing project when you already know more or less where you're going.

Given that Ulysses is developed by (I believe) working journalists and Scrivener by a chap who wanted to write a novel and couldn't find the right app to do it in, it's curious that, for me at least, Scrivener turns out to be ideal for non-fiction while Ulysses is rather better-suited to the total immersion required for writing fiction. (Others may disagree, of course.)

Put even more simply, I find Scrivener encourages a smaller granularity that Ulysses. Scrivener's natural unit is a scene at a time; Ulysses', a chapter at a time. Depends what you're doing and how you like to write.

As to price -- well, if you write in order to put bread on the table, the cost of either is small beer compared with the benefits they deliver.

Try them both. You might end up buying them both. How many tools does a carpenter have in his toolbox?  
(Version 1.6r2)

LEV  If you think it's too expensive that's either because (a) you don't think it's worth it for you or (b) you can't afford it.

If (a) then you don't need it -- the cost/benefit analysis doesn't work out.

If (b, then (i) join the struggle of the oppressed proletariat for world peace, social equality, free software and no nasty spindly insects ever again anywhere (heck, the communist states did really good productivity software back in the day, didn't they?) or (ii) don't buy it; if enough people feel the same, the developers will drop their price or go out of business.

Or there's a third way. Do as I do. Moan about the price, buy it anyway despite neither needing it nor being able to afford it, don't use it, and feel cross and guilty when the phone service cuts me off because I can't afford to pay the phone bill because I've spent my money on apps I don't need and won't use. Works for me. But honestly, "It's too expensive" is hardly a review, is it?

My own opinion of THL? Looks gorgeous, powerful, etc. But I won't buy it. I've tried them all and they don't work, or possibly *I* don't work; whichever, GTD and all the rest of it haven't got me out of my slough of idleness. The only thing that works is someone shouting at me down the phone. And I can get that for free....

So I won't buy it. I really, really won't buy it. Really I won't. This time it's going to be different...  
(Version 0.9.3.11)

LEV  Read the developer's opening remark. He's succeeded. Schreiben feels-- completely intangible and I can't explain it -- better than the excellent Bean, and at only $9 more, it's money well spent. Have a look at his website; the guy's imaginative and good. (And it's nice to have apps with European names, but that's just my EuroChauvinism...)  
(Version 4.9.1)

LEV  Very nice app, and very Mac-like. I had a router crash and could only solve the problem by re=installing FarFinder but since I use a crufty BT-badged SpeedTouch router I'm inclined to blame that rather than FF.

Logging on remotely is a breeze. In some ways it's easier that Back To My Mac, which can occasionally go AWOL without apparent reason. I spend a fair amount of the year away from home so instead of trying to pre-empt every possibility by taking a chock-full laptop, I can just take what I /think/ I'm going to need and backhaul anything I turn out to need unexpectedly.

The setup is straightforward. No tecchie skills required. Only problem I had was setting up gmail SMTP for emailing files direct from FarFinder. But a quick check on the gmail site solved that (a port problem. Use Server port 465 and SSL and your full username (foo.bar@gmail.com, not just foo.bar) and you should be fine.

Haven't really tested it to death in the wild, but so far looks like a damn fine piece of life insurance.  
(Version 1.3.3)

LEV  Can't speak for anyone else, but I've been using it since it first appeared. Paid enough over the years, too. I just find I don't use it any more and the current version is terrible slow. There are easier ways of doing things. Your experience is obviously different and good luck to you.  
(Version 2.0.2096)

LEV   Bean and JNR are not the same thing. If you had used both, you'd know. Bean is a fine lightweight RTF app; a kind of TextEdit with a little bit more. JNR is an app for writing books, papers etc, with built=in live outlining, a note-taking facility, very well implemented marginalia which can be categorised for different kinds of notes etc.

Both get text into a file. Fine. After that, they diverge considerably. And if you don't think JNr is, even theoretically, worth $20 or whatever, then you don't need it.  
(Version 1.1.8)

LEV  The screenshot -- an empty catalog with a threat to prosecute -- says all we need to know about Microsoft's attitude. I'd like to think it an April Fool gag but...

Here's the blurb from the Microsoft Site:

"Find Your Stuff

Work at Warp Speed

Sharing is Eveything"

FInd Your Stuff: I can already do this with Bridge, Leap, Deep, Spotlight, Lightroom/Aperture or -- gosh -- iPhoto.

Work at Warp Speed: Depends what you mean by "warp". Slow as slow on my MBP and iMac.

Sharing is Everything: Nope. Functionality is pretty important, as are speed, stability and interface. Expression Media (what a phony feelgood name) fails on all counts.

I used iView Media Pro for a couple of book projects. It was OK. Microsoft bought it. It declined. Cause and effect?  
(Version 2.0.1)

LEV  Good grief. I wish you could tell us what company you work for, so I could write to them and get one of these letters back... :)  
(Version 4.7)

LEV  Well _that_ was useful. Thanks. It's a privilege to share your thoughtful insights.  
(Version 2.0.4)

LEV  @easer: Pages used to save its own native documents as packages. It doesn't any more unless you tell it to (Preferences>General>Save new documents as packages).

It never saved Word .doc exports as packages. It's not possible. If a file is a .doc, it's not a package.

The problem must lies somewhere else.  
(Version 3.0.3)

LEV  Neat. Useful. Cheap.

@Xenophile: smart folders do some of the stuff that Fresh does but in a more cumbersome way; they have their own uses, of course. But the ability to drag from Fresh to the "cooler" -- for stuff you want to keep handy pro tem. -- isn't easily replicated in smart folders.

I suppose it depends, as always, what you use your Mac for. In my case, time = money. Fresh doesn't have to save me that much time rootling around in folders for it to have earned its keep. (That's the same reason I use Leap.)

Fresh, and the Cooler in particular, give me a glimpse of what Custom Stacks could have been if Apple had gone ahead with them in Leopard: ad hoc collections of stuff from all over the place, kept together for the time being without interfering with the underlying folder structures. "Aliases," you may say. Well, yes. But see my remark on smart folders. Aliases are just a bit too clumsy for everyday use on the fly.  
(Version 1.1.1)

LEV  Kudos to the developers for a fast response to a bug which came out of a clue blue sky...  
(Version 1.0b13)

LEV  None of the problems others are reporting, but it does seem that SafariStand doesn't work with Safari 4. I use Stand's excellent web page clipping CM a lot; so I guess I'll just wait until the developers upgrade it.

Only one conceptual problem: Top Sites gives away too much information. You'll never get away with the old "Oh, I tried to go to YouTube but the pesky thing sent me to YouPr0n instead" when it comes up as your Top Top Site... but then Apple doesn't believe in confidentiality any more (cf. the way iPhone shows everyone, at the very least, who has been texting you; and, usually, what they've said as well. I wonder if the iPhone division is waiting for the first lawsuit...)

(Ooops. Off-topic. But there you go.)  
(Version 4.0b1)

LEV  After using the DevonThink public beta for six weeks or so, I'd have to say it's a great improvement. It's not so much a breakthrough upgrade, but rather lots of incremental improvements which add up to a far better user experience. It's definitely faster; it seems far more nimble; the (not yet fully implemented) "Sorter" makes Getting Stuff In quicker and easier, and the bookmarklets for interfacing between DevonThink and the web work, for me, more satisfactorily than most apps which position themselves as competition.

One of the most asked-for enhancements is now working: full Boolean and proximity searches of the database. Before, you had to rely on DT's "artifical intelligence" -- some sort of word-based semantic algorithm -- if you wanted to do more than a simple word- or phrase-search. The AI usually delivered the goods but it's nice to be able to order up a search by hand if needed.

You can now have multiple databases open at once. Great. Drag-and-drop between databases hasn't yet been switched on in the beta, but is in place for the release version.

The developers have also implemented tagging, but we won't know what that's like until that, too, goes live. Personally I hope it is compatible with tagging-based apps like Punakea or the superb Leap; we will have to see. Given that it uses the Finder to organise its database, rather than copying everything into a proprietary format, there's no reason why it shouldn't be.

There are still some things on the wish-list. Of course they are. It would be even more powerful if, for example, it would let the user set up his own list of "synonyms". The Windows app Nota Bene does this, to great effect. You can, for example, tell it that when you ask for things to do with religion, it should look for words from a user-configured list: "Hindu, Muslim, Roman catholic, priest, nun, monk, curch, chapel, synagogue, Rabbi..." etc. Sweet.

But, for whatever reason, after trying just about every "bucket" app going, I find with DevonThink 2 beta, I'm sticking with it. It's open all the time. The UI is still a mile away from the (much less powerful) Yojimbo, but DT is engineering-led and I suspect they'd rather have a slightly complex UI than compromise functionality.

Definitely a runner. After a long time lagging behind a bit, DT is back in the game, and all the better for it. The 120 non-continuous hours' free trial is generous and enough to explore this very powerful app. Give it a whirl.  
(Version 2.0pb3)

LEV  Er... no. Perhaps it's them.  
(Version 3.0.3)

LEV  Phil Dow, developer of Journler, has said he will continue some sort of work with the app for 1- 2 years but then that's it for him. He's happy to hand it off to other developers, though. His full - and remarkably honest & straight-talking - post on the matter is here:

http://www.journler.com/community/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3925  
(Version 2.5.5)

LEV  This is a beta. The developers are perfectly open about the sorter not being fully implemented yet. A number of features aren't up and running. You might want to check the available documentation. (Or you might not. Who knows.)  
(Version 2.0pb2)

LEV  It's said that the next version of EverSave will allow one to do precisely that. WHich will be useful, to say the least.  
(Version 09)

LEV  Speaking as a control freak, I'd say autosave can be a double-edged sword. You could always use EverSave (donationware) to achieve the same thing.

("Double-edged sword"? Puzzling. I thought most sword were double-edged. Perhaps it should be "double ended" or "sword which it also totally has this like really sharp handle, too" or something.)  
(Version 09)

LEV  In my reply to the previous poster I forgot to mention a couple of things which tilt the balance of power further towards Mellel over Pages '09.

First, a small but significant omission in Pages: you can't define the Outline Level of a paragraph style. Word has been able to do this for as long as I can remember and it's surprisingly useful. In Pages you have to (a) select every occurrence of the style you want to change, then re-assign it all to the pre-ordained Outline Level style. It's probably not that interesting for anyone doing a short document but for handling long docs, even relatively unstructured ones, it's nice to be able to kill the *visual* link between appearance and outline level while retaining the *structural* link.

Mellel's approach is quite different. The outline structure is in a different window (or "drawer", rather) and you can set it up so that the outline headings are actually invisible in the text itself. So headings enable you to keep an eye on your structure -- and move it all around at will -- while keeping the actual copy clean.

The other, and big, thing about Mellel which nothing else offers is the idea of Style Sets. I have one for on-screen work and one for printed work, for example. With literally one mouse-click you can change *everything* about a document's appearance while leaving the structure untouched. It's immensely powerful and very useful.

I believe the thing that confuses people about Mellel is that it adopts the sound engineering principle of front-end loading. That means you make your decisions about formatting etc. in advance, then save all those decisions -- paragraph and character styles, footnotes, auto-titling and everything -- as a style set which can be applied to any document, even retrospectively, with a minimum of effort.

For actual writing -- as opposed to collaborating with others -- Mellel remains unmatched. If the developers implement change tracking and commenting in a way compatible with Word (the awful golem lurching about the entire world of WP) then there'll be no reason ever to use anything else. But it's hard, because Mellel (a) takes such a different approach to structure -- it's more like LaTeX in that respect, though without the geekiness -- and (b) does so many things that can't be transferred to Word files because Word just can't do them.  
(Version 2.6)

LEV  That doesn't get us anywhere, really. Too expensive for what it does? Ulysses doesn't do anything. Like every other application, it just sits there quietly, waiting. The question is, what do YOU do? If you earn some or all of your living writing, Ulysses may be just what you need. If you don't, it might not be. The point of MacUpdate, surely, is to tell others what the app does and how well it does it, and leave it to them to decide whether it's useful & worth the money.  
(Version 1.6r2)

LEV  Oh LORD that's so AWFUL. Lured in! By an evil iPhone app! Oh poor you! Oh the humanity! You know, I had this dog when I was little and it got RUN OVER and it DIED and it was AWFUL. But no more helpful to this review site than your sad little bleating.  
(Version 1.0.1)

LEV  Look, the most expensive apps out there aren't $49.99 before discount for heaven's sake. They're things like Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, Final Cut Pro etc etc.

Little calculation: If you earn $40,000 a year you're getting paid roughly $20 an hour. Suppose using Things saves you, say, 30 minutes a week just by helping you to get better organised. The break-even point on your investment comes after five weeks. Pretty good.

Suppose you're so behind with work your personal life is suffering. Suppose you're so worried about the stuff you've got to do, and where to start, that you can't sleep at night. Suppose your boss is beginning to look sideways at you because you're always behind the curve with work. In any of these cases, fifty bucks might seem a reasonable investment to help sort things out.

I'm not saying it will. I'm too damn lazy and disorganized to be saved by Things, OmniFocus, TaskPaper or anything. But others might be. And for them, the price is well worth the benefits.

Oh, and the iPhone app is a different thing altogether. You don't need it to use Things on your desktop, nor vice-versa. (How much did you pay for your iPhone?)

Say what you mean. It might be "I don't need it" or "I'm not paying that money" or "I'm too mean" or "I'm too poor" (no shame in that). But "It's too expensive" gets us nowhere. "Too expensive" means "It costs too much money for what it can do FOR ME." Arguing from a sample of 1 is seldom illuminating, really.  
(Version 1.0.1)

LEV  Posting guideline #1: "Be detailed and specific"...

Pages '09 is good, no question about it. But it and Mellel are in no way the same beast contending for the same environmental niche.

Mellel offers:

- Cross-referencing (and the best implementation of cross-referencing I have yet seen).

- Structural and far more controllable outlining

- Multiple footnote and endnote streams

- Tight integration with Sente and Bookends

- Immensely powerful, structural use of styles

- Auto-titling

- High-octane control over headers and footers, including "mentions" - the ability to display in the header/footer the current section/subsection etc. of a document

- Powerful document variables

- Powerful find-and-replace, including find/replace by highlight colour

- Extensive typographical control

AFIK, Pages offers none of those things. Pages offers:

- Reasonably simple export/mail/publish as Word or PDF

- Sophisticated layout capabilities

- Simple management of (visual, not structural) styles

- Preconfigured templates

- Change tracking

- Comments

AFIK, Mellel offers none of those things.

Amalgamate the features and we end up with The Behemoth, a.k.a. Word Redux. Both Pages and Mellel do what they do much better than Word. But if I had to be simplistic, Mellel is for the academic or technical or other writer of structured manuscripts, while Pages is for the general or business user who wants to turn out visually elegant but structurally straightforward documents.

Both rule. But they rule different kingdoms.

And then of course there's Nisus: somewhere between the two. Oh, the tyranny of choice...  
(Version 2.6)

LEV  Can't comment on Numbers as I seldom use a spreadsheet; but I imagine the mailmerge between Numbers and Pages will suit a lot of people who felt hemmed in by the previous version, which only let you merge with Address Book contacts. And Keynote... I don't use it enough to comment, although it looks very fine and has superseded PowerPoint in every detail, long ago. But Pages I can comment on.

Pages '09 is very smooth. The dynamic outlining feature works flawlessly (even if the fancy transition from Outline view to Pages view is slow on my G5 desktop machine) and its ability to collapse body text to the first line in Outline view is a fine way to move around long documents. (Yes, yes, Word has had that for years but... well... outlining in Word is, for me at least, (a) broken and (b) more trouble than it's worth.)

Speed of navigation in long documents is good. Round-trip with Word works fine. But the best feature for me is the iWork.com publishing system. A bit like Google Docs but smoother. Editors or collaborators can comment on the web version or download Pages, .doc or PDF files. I tried it from scratch and it worked flawlessly even though it's allegedly in beta. They can work in whatever they like; _we_ can stay in Pages until the very last moment. Sweet.

Pages itself still isn't quite the heavyweight WP I'd want for book-length mss., particularly academic work. It lacks cross-referencing and only has footnotes (no endnotes or multiple note streams like Mellel, still the academic gold standard). And why on earth did Apple go for compatibility with the lethal, belly-dragging, antediluvian Endnote instead of Sente and/or Bookends? (Though Bookends within a few days announced compatibility with the Pages native format.)

But with those provisos, it's a winner.  
(Version 09)

LEV  Really? I'd have though that logically it was _more_ reassuring to have bugs picked up as they are found, rather than the Microsoft method of saying "Yes, we know the thing is ridden with bugs but you'll just have to take that risk until we put out a 'service pack' to fix some of them and introduce new ones. When will that be? That's for us to know and you to find out."  
(Version 2.0.2)

LEV  Links? Hello? Links? LINKS? You know: like this that?

I can't understand why, when Tinderbox and Notebook and Notetaker and DevonThink and Scrivener and VoodooPad and TAO and Curio and all those other apps which take into account that one way of managing information is by LINKING information, Omni still haven't stuck links -- LINKS -- into Outliner. Oh, I forgot. That one other thing which has links. You know. The interweb.

Just to clarify, this comment is about LINKS.

May we have them? I mean, they *have* been invented already.  
(Version 3.7.2)

LEV  And this is supposed to be helpful how, exactly?  
(Version 2.5)

LEV  From their website: "Sente 5 Undergraduate Edition has all of the features of the regular product, but limits the size of each library to 250 references."

I doubt there are many undergraduate courses which require >250 references for individual modules/papers/projects. As far as I can see, there's no limit on the *number* of ≤250-reference libraries you can have.

Do I think postgrads "bath" in money? No. Nor do undergraduate clinical medical students; yet they manage to buy a stethoscope.

Let me expand the calculation. A cheap pint of beer in Chicago is $3. (http://www.pintprice.com/region.php?/United_States/usd.html) The undergraduate edition of Sente is $40. That's thirteen beers. The average undergraduate course lasts three years. To buy Sente (undergraduate edition) would involve drinking roughly one beer fewer per quarter.

The full academic licence, over a three-year PhD course, would come out at one beer fewer every six weeks.

The cost/benefit analysis is up to the individual. But if you really, really can't skip that extra beer every two or three months, there's always BibTex...  
(Version 5.7)

LEV  "See this as my review"? It's no more a review than the person you're attacking. This ad hominem snarling does nothing for anyone. Bear in mind that the plural of "opinion" is not "data". You've not justified one of your assertions, which makes them worthless.

To the bemused:

DevonThink Pro is a heavyweight information manager designed for collecting, annotating, categorizing and retrieval of info such as text notes, pdfs, webarchives and so on. Its interface is a little outdated and it lacks more recent functionality like tagging. Devotees overlook that for its speed, stability and clever "AI" retrieval functions. It is NOT a writing environment nor is it intended to be.

Scrivener is the equivalent of an infinitely-expandable three-ring binder. It offers storage and manipulation of research material though not with the heavy-lift capabilities of DevonThink. It is, however, a comprehensive writing environment complete with a functional outliner, non-contiguous text selection, concatenation and editing, footnoes and comments (RTF/Word compatible), system-wide clippings and annotation services, and a wide range of manuscript export formats. It sits, for most writers, between something like DevonThink and a formatting app like Mellel or Nisus.

Hope that unmuddies the waters a bit.  
(Version 1.12b1)

LEV  But isn't it nice to live without upgrade fever for a while... & tempting to ask "What does Scrivener currently not do that you need it to do?"

But the reality is that what the developer Keith Blount calls v1.5 and anyone else would call v2.0 is about to go into private beta testing any day now.

It's also worth saying that Mr Blount's idea of an early beta is some way ahead of, say, Microsoft or FileMaker's idea of a release version. So (I speculate) the private beta cycle should be fairly fast.

[No connection with the developer. Just a happy camper.]  
(Version 1.12b1)

LEV  FYI, Bookends sucketh not. Nor does Sente. Either are way ahead of EndNote with better online functionality and better customer support. EndNote is a dinosaur; as medics are no longer allowed to write on patients' notes, it's T.F. BUNDY. (= "Totally f***** but unfortunately not dead yet.")  
(Version X2.0.1)

LEV  Arrogance indeed. But that seems to be the ticket with Bento at the moment. But it occurs to me that with a product manager and marketing team like they've got, Bento doesn't have the most secure of futures, and I don't feel like locking in my data to a company that can't even manage a bugfix flatgrade without (a) gouging and (b) alienating its customers. I suppose if you still think something for non-heavyweight users = incomplete, slow, buggy and cumbersome, Bento may be the trick, but the initial year's experience, culminating in the flatgrade v2 mugging attempt, is too unpromising to have any confidence at all in the app's future.

Now I am going to stop obsessing about these whangers, leave them to feel the chill pinch of the new harshly-contracted market conditions, and get on with hauling my valuable data out of there.

As they nearly used to say on the old punch cards: Do Not Bento, Fold, Spindle or Multilate.  
(Version 2.0v2)

LEV  Agree with your remarks except it's not really comparing like with like to compare Bento with SoHo Notes, Yojimbo or any of the other snippet keepers, none of which offer or claim to offer comparable functionality.  
(Version 2.0v2)

LEV  Quick followup after using this upgrade (flatgrade? up-pay?) today"

-- Reports: no substantive improvement.

-- Speed: like treacle. Slower on my G5 iMac and MacBook than v1

-- Printing: no substantive improvement

-- New "themes": uninteresting

-- New split view: useful.

-- Search/select: hopeless. Still either "all" or "any"; no searches like "Find everything with (A and B) and (C or D) let alone anything more complex.

-- No ability to base new smart folders on existing ones; in other words, impossible to search subsets of data.

-- Drag data as Export to Numbers: Numbers crashes

This is lamentable.  
(Version 2.0v2)

LEV  I spoke too soon. Bento 2 is here. Full price, it would appear. No upgrade, it would appear. The fiduciary morality of carnival barkers, it would appear.

Less than a year in, and FileMaker are trying to gouge us for another $50 for what's in effect a point release of stuff that should have been in there from the start. Yay! It can store emails. Yay! It can import Numbers files! Yay! there are TEN MORE THEMES! Yay! Th-- no, actually, I don't mean "yay". I mean "feh". Printing is still rudimentary, the reporting functions are pretty well Pleistocene, etc etc. Demanding full price again is just insulting.

Oh, yaaaawn. I'll see about getting my stuff out of Bento and back into Excel, and then FileMaker can go twist in the wind. They've had my money for a substandard product. They're not getting it again for something that's still not up to the mark.  
(Version 2.0v2)

LEV  Well really Sente and the other heavy-lifting biblio software are rather more than the average undergraduate needs. And once you move to postgraduate work, a $90-odd investment in the daily work of your profession doesn't seem so much to spend. (One less beer a month over the average PhD course, to put it in perspective.)  
(Version 5.6.15)

LEV  Oops. That was meant to be a reply to X9 below.  
(Version 3.0b)

LEV  Sorry, but that's nonsense; LaunchBar doesn't use either the desktop or the menubar. It activates IN the menubar with a keystroke, or you can cmd-tab to it in the list of running apps if you like. In other words, it runs just as it always has.  
(Version 3.0b)

LEV  Bento users get regular self-promoting and rather excitable mailings but, as others have pointed out, nothing has been done to address the many, very serious failings of the application. I don't mean things that would put it into the "relational database" league or interfere with its positioning as a low-end filing system, but crucial things like only one list view, no shortcut between list and detail views, no possibility of customizing the "themes", export limited to CSV (comma-separated value) files, and, worst of all, no attempt at implementing any sort of reports. Getting stuff in is okay. Manipulating stuff within Bento is... well, reasonable, if rudimentary. But getting stuff *out* is just a joke.

Given that the point of any filing system is not storage, but *retrieval*, this seems a conceptual gaffe on a fairly large scale. I was a bit mystified at first, but assumed it was about shipping now and sorting things out later. Well... it's later now, and no sign of any substantive improvement. It's rather depressing, as Bento had (has?) plenty of unrealized potential.  
(Version 1.0v2)

LEV  Looks good, but severely crippled by its inability to read .wma files. In other words, if you're using an Olympus voice recorder, forget it. A shame, but there it is. (Transcriva, on the other hand, deals with WMA seamlessly and IMO has a cleaner interface. Express Scribe seems more geared to the typing-pool sort of user.

If ES read .wma files, of course it would be brilliant value for (no) money...  
(Version 4.05)

LEV  Gosh, Sente and its competition Bookends don't need reviewers; at the moment, they need a sports commentator. Sente just pulled into the lead with totally customisable conditional fields ("print X unless field A is empty, in which case print Y"). Can't wait to see Bookends' response. Except perhaps I should do some work, instead of watching Sonny Software and Third Street doing *their* work...)  
(Version 5.6.4)

LEV  Yup. I use Ulysses and Scrivener and all sorts of other stuff and while I love Scrivener, it can be annoying trying to untangle rtf messes in final export to Mellel or Nisus for cleaning-up. Ulysses pre-empts that by enforcing a tagged plaintext workspace. Like Mellel, there's a certain initial discipline involved which (if you're as undisciplined as I am) can be a pain; but once established, it works fine. In other words, it's superficially very similar, but its underlying philosophy is very different.

I agree that Lord Scrivener is a tiny bit predictable. If I didn't know either app, I'd be tempted to go with Ulysses just to annoy him. I know it's meant well, but, lord, it does seem a bit bullying after the nth iteration. I half expect to see him appear over my shoulder in the mirror and announce that my shaving brush is quite the wrong sort & I should be using Scrivener... :-)

No offence, Lightning, but evangelism, even the most sincere, doesn't always produce the desired effect. (Hands up everyone who has stood on their doorstep and said "Yes! You're right! I see now that Mormonism is the only true way!)  
(Version 1.6r2)

LEV  Rather a silly remark of no value to anyone. If you can't afford it or don't want to pay for it, don't buy it. If you use it every day to run all sorts of projects and gather & collate masses of information, then the price is pretty much negligible.   
(Version 2.2.2)

LEV  Here we go again. Eight or nine months ago I shelled out for an expensive upgrade to v4. Now a whole lot of "pro" features have been drifted down to cheaper versions but Zengobi want to take another gouge out of me to upgrade to v5. Guys: 4.2.4 to 5.0 in one jump is pretty steep. You can only skin a cat so many times...  
(Version 5.0)

LEV  Hmm... but if a "learning curve" is a function which plots X against Y, where X is effort and Y is return-on-effort, something easy to learn would have a very steep curve -- rapid return for little effort. Conversely a shallow curve would depict small returns for large efforts. We use it in the exact opposite sense, which is fine since we all know what we mean; it's just a bit odd if you happen to catch sight of the expression afresh.

As for AI -- DevonThink is splendid on that score. The only beef I have is that I'd like it to be either a bit less opaque or to have the option of more direct control if I wanted (i.e. Boolean searching, which is promised for v2; on previous showing, that'll be arriving at about the same time as the Rapture but I guess I can wait...)  
(Version 1.5.3)

LEV  Yeah... but on the other hand I can spell like a veritable god, but couldn't code my way out of a wet Kleenex. Everyone to his own talents ;-)  
(Version 4.6b2)

LEV  For those of us in the (non-MLA) humanities, life just got a bit more difficult.

With Sente’s latest iteration, we now have two first-rate reference managers (Bookends being the other) and no excuse for sticking with the lamentable gouging corporatism behind EndNote ($100 a year, more or less, for “upgrades” which consist of bug fixes (more or less)).

Sente now offers “tabbed browsing” -- an onboard WebKit browser with “data detectors” that enable you to home in on, for example, a JSTOR paper and grab its reference and PDF. It has great note-taking capabilities, RTF file attachments viewable from within the app., easily-customisable references for footnotes and in-text styles, and an excellent UI.

The choice is hard.

Bookends is probably a gnat’s-whisker more customisable on the citations front (particularly with its ability to force, to some extent, the behaviour of a citation when an element is missing) and allows the user to rename the same field for different reference types (“Book title” in Books, the same field called “Article title” in Journal Articles, for example). Sente is a bit more authoritarian in this respect.

For online searching and grabbing of references, Sente has the lead. Neither of them has two great killer features -- the ability to copy a note or a quote and have it appear in the target document complete with reference and pages cites, and the ability to link references/notes/quotes to other references with some cognitive functionality, as in the great and lamented Papyrus which never made it to OS X.

(In Papyrus you could link My Great Book to His Lousy Book with the link “Cites” and lo!, His Lousy Book would be linked to My Great Book with the link type “Cited in”. Marvellous).

But I imagine these things will come. The Sente guys and Jon of Sonny Software, author of Bookends, are now engaged in an excellent battle for mastery and for once the end-user is really benefitting from competition. Hooray!

The only thing I can say is: try them out and decide for yourself. But for heaven’s sake, do *decide*. Do *not* follow my example and end up with a Bookends database and a Sente database and *no real clue what’s where*. The end decision will be down, as always, to personal choice. But it’s really good to have such a difficult choice to make.

Kudos (kudoides?) all round.  
(Version 5.6.1)

LEV  The new FoxTrot Professional beta is promising, although at €99 it's pretty steeply priced. BUT... it can't index Mail.app emails. Just ignores them. And if you index them with FoxTrot 1.5 and then upgrade the index (automatically) to 2.0 beta, it's unable to preview them, which rather kills the point.

Hopefully this is a beta bug. If not, it obliterates FoxTrot, which would be a shame.

I'd have filed a bug reported, but their website -- perhaps the worst developer's site I've ever seen, so bad it makes me want to demolish the internet -- has no means of doing so. Perhaps they just don't want to know bad news. Perhaps it's some Swiss secrecy thing. Who knows?

The skinny: stick with 1.5 for the time being.  
(Version 2.0b3)

LEV  This is a VERY annoying app to review because I can't think of anything to complain about. It does what it says it does, elegantly and quickly. It's also in an odd way quite witty -- you'll see what I mean if you try it. It's already changed my workflow for web posting of images, which is a fair indication of just how good it is.

Superb.  
(Version 1.0b6.1)

LEV  Oops. The previous was meant to be a reply to the reply to the long review before it... meh. Whatever.  
(Version 1.5)

LEV  What a helpful comment.  
(Version 1.5)

LEV  Now that Nisus does comments -- which make the round trip to Word seamlessly -- there's even less need to have the Beast of Redmond on your machine. Some may need revision tracking (which Pages does quite well) but for the rest of us who work with editors who comment our mss., Nisus has pretty well everything we need.

For writers who use Scrivener for the actual process of composition, Nisus seems the perfect partner. For pure academic writing with multiple footnotes etc., Mellel perhaps still has the edge, particularly with the stunning implementation of cross-references in the latest 2.5 beta and its perfect integration with Bookends (and, I believe, Sente). This is a fine time to be a writer -- of whatever kind -- using a Mac. There are solutions for everything, and none of them involve The Beast. Nisus, Scrivener, Tinderbox, Schreiben, Bean, Mellel, Screenwriter 6, Montage, Ulysses... the list is endless and we're spoiled for choice. Hooray.  
(Version 1.1p1)

LEV  Those are pretty serious accusations. Care to back them up with any evidence?

Oh - and "myopic" refers to sight, not hearing. So myopic listeners would be at no disadvantage at all.

FWIW, I like OmniWeb, have never had problems with it, and if I hit a non-compliant (a.k.a. "heavily windozed") site, which happens very, very rarely, I just move on.  
(Version 5.7)

LEV  I know this can't be true... I mean, it really can't, can it?... but it looks as if data in Bento isn't visible to Spotlight.

Obviously I'm missing something because for Bento to be non-Spotlight-friendly would be beyond crass. Beyond stupid. Beyond anything we'd expect from Filemaker--

Oops. Hang on. Did I just say "Filemaker"?

Hmm.  
(Version 1.0v2)

LEV  Open Terminal and type in

/usr/bin/mdimport -r /Library/Spotlight/Mellel.mdimporter

followed by return. That did the trick  
(Version 2.2.7.2)

LEV  Update: Mellel seems to play nicely with Spotlight in 10.5.2. Phew.  
(Version 2.2.7.2)

LEV  Better now, dear?  
(Version 2.2.7.2)

LEV  TexLogic - I originally took issue with Mendota (see my post above) but once he explained his thinking about caches and the naive user, I realise he has a very good point.

Your comment about it being the user's responsibility is fine but it assumes an ideal world. In the real world, there are lots of users who are barely potty-trained enough to get by, and apps that can help them will do better (and are more responsible IT citizens) than libertarian apps which just say "Don't whine if you get hosed". You might argue that Spotlight is redundant because it's the user's job to make sure that his/her files are consistently named and stored in a logical directory structure. Now tell Grandma when she can't find the first draft of her part-time PhD thesis...  
(Version 1.7.4)

LEV  Interesting point & I hadn't thought of that particular scenario. This would be something to take up with the developers, I guess.

Of course there are caches of all kinds of stuff all over the machine... a big weakness & invisible (and unknown) to most 'ordinary' users who, I suspect, think the original file is all there is.

A global solution like File Vault is probably the safest, at a guess. That's what I use, though there is an overhead.

If people are going to start ScanSnapping their way to the paperless filing cabinet, then we have to think more carefully about security. You've given me an idea for an article. Thanks!  
(Version 1.7.4)

LEV  Oops. Forgot to rate it... four stars for features because... because... damn. There *was* something but I forgot. Still, there's always room for more features, right?  
(Version 2.5)

LEV  Even without the new Leopard compatibility, this is a good upgrade with a number of well-implemented and useful improvements. Leopard compatibility has indeed taken a while, but that's not least because of the meticulous high standards of the developer, Mr Nanian, who has been frank and open about the problems on his blog. His attitude (very different to the more "corporate" developers, who basically keep users in the dark) makes it much easier to have confidence in his product. SuperDuper has never let me down and has saved my bacon on a few occasions. SD and Time Machine make a powerful and easy backup strategy; it's as simple to do it as not to do it, which, for an admin schlub like me, is crucial.

As to the previous poster: saying "it doesn't work" is a bit sweeping. "It doesn't work for me" would be more to the point. The number of satisfied users would suggest, perhaps, that the problem may be in his system or his setup. An email to Mr Nanian might be more productive than denouncing his software here.  
(Version 2.5)

LEV  Partition. The. Drive

:-)  
(Version 2.5)

LEV  Agreed with the previous comment -- no, Yep won't make your personal PDF files any MORE private than they already are. I don't think it's offered as a security solution. If Yep can see your PDFs, then, true, anyone can see them. And the originals will still be readable. It's more like a Finder for PDFs, and a brilliantly usable and slick one at that. You could perhaps imitate some of its features by using Spotlight and QuickLook in Leopard, but the tagging, sorting and finding functions in Yep are much more fluently thought-out. I find the application invaluable; and I have a feeling that no viewer/finder can apply a security Band-Aid to an insecure system. Security perhaps needs to happen at a deeper level and is in the hands of the user. But YMMV.

As to developer responsiveness: I only had cause to email them once, and got an immediate, and thorough, response.  
(Version 1.7.3)

LEV  You don't like it, don't buy it. But I don't see that the issue calls for moralizing. Baseline may be a version of whatever-you-said-it-was, but some of us aren't command line magi nor do we have any interest in becoming one.

The argument is false. I pay someone to clean my house. She does nothing I couldn't do myself. But I'd rather pay her to do it. She gets paid, I get relieved of a task I don't like. This is the same sort of of deal. It's not about ethics. It's about convenience and the free market, unless I'm missing something crucial here. Which is, of course, possible...  
(Version 1.0.2)

LEV  There are plenty of snippet-keepers and junk drawers already... BUT ShoveBox has something special, at least for the way I use things: a hotkey which brings up a notepad. Often when working on something I have a quick idea for something else. Open a new document, type, save, try to remember where/when to open it again? Nah. Open a new APP, ditto? Nah, x2. Hit a key combo, make note, hit enter? YES. And the notes are all there -- along with anything dragged onto the ShoveBox icon -- at the end of the day when I clean up my desk. (Or ::should:: clean up my desk.)

It's a great little feature of real workflow benefit. As for the bigger-scale features -- I agree that a preview pane is really important for the future of this app. But the other stuff... well, I'd say that ShoveBox is really a temporary sort of InBox; a dumping ground or halfway-house for stuff en route to a more permanent home or to the trash ("Why on earth did I think ::that:: was worth clipping this morning...?) so permanent-storage features aren't that vital IMO.

It's the QuickJot that does it for me. Well worth the $ for that alone.  
(Version 1.1)

LEV  Rather. Good. Upgrade.

For me, anyway, though it's dangerous to argue from a sample of one. But... unlike the previous reviewer, scrollwheel (and two-finger trackpad scrolling) works just fine for me, and MacJournal posted without problem to my Typepad blog.

I've no axe to grind here. I've tried MacJournal a few times and on each occasion decided it wasn't for me. I use Journler for journalling and information hoarding, and Ecto for blogging. But this version seems much nicer. I'm tempted to give it a try.

But fifteen days isn't enough to evaluate it; not if you have work to do at the same time. It's caught my interest. If I fire it up again in a few days when I have a break in work, and it says "This demo has expired," so will my interest. Thirty days is the standard in the industry for a good reason: it's about long enough.  
(Version 5.0.1)

LEV  Good point. But you still actually SEE everything; sometimes I want to say "Just show me the stuff that's really high priority". Otherwise the list can get visually overwhelming.

Perhaps the truth is GTD doesn't work for me. As a writer, working from home, I don't have contexts really. I don't have meetings, I don't commute, differentiating @work from @home is kind of meaningless, and if I'm here, the Mac is here and so is the internet... perhaps something simpler (TaskPaper?) would be better for my needs.  
(Version 1.0)

LEV  "YMMV" stands for "Your Mileage May Vary". To put it more simply, we are both using the same system version; it works on my machine but not on yours; therefore the problem is probably something to do with your machine configuration rather than being inherent in Pads X (in which case it wouldn't work on my machine either).

I hope that clarifies it.  
(Version 2.0.1)

LEV  I've been using OF since early alpha releases, and contrary to Granola's experience, it's never lost a single piece of data, even with daily, often multiple, updates operating on the same data file -- fine coding by the Omni team. (Once I thought it had eaten my data, but it turned out that I had a filter still set that I hadn't noticed.)

It's a cool app, though more GTD-centric than they might suggest. No support for priorities, for example, and heavy reliance on the Projects & Contexts concept. But if GTD works for you, then, I'd guess, so will OF. There's a learning curve, largely because the thing is very flexible in the way you can view your Stuff; but in the end it does the job elegantly, reliably and stably.  
(Version 1.0)

LEV  PS to my previous post -- in response to the earlier reviewer, I haven't had any Safari/web problems with this release.  
(Version 1.5)

LEV  The main drawback of DevonThink for me (I've used it since it first appeared) has been its refusal to play with Spotlight. This -- because I'm a data slut, never quite sure where anything is -- has meant ≥2 searches for whatever-it-is: one in Spotlight, then one for each DevonThink database whatever-it-is might be in.

This was on the point of driving me away from DevonThink... particularly with Leopard's much-improved Spotlight implementation.

Fortunately, with v1.5, it now plays very nicely with Spotlight. Still no QuickLook, but at least it means that just one Spotlight search can pull up everything.

So once again DevonThink is at the head of the pack. Thank you, Devon Technologies.

I'd give it 5 'features' stars now, if only it offered (a) multiple databases open simultaneously, and (b) tagging, instead of enforcing a folder hierarchy and "replicants". Oh, and Boolean searching -- though the AI "see also" function is magnificent.

Interface looks a bit outdated now, but works. It's much snappier than before. And the learning curve is steep. (Actually, I think I mean "shallow" -- you spend a lot of time getting up to speed. A "steep" learning curve would be e.g. Yojimbo, where you go from Novice to Expert user almost instantly.)

Nor can it import files from some of my most-used applications. Tinderbox and Scrivener I can understand; they are both complex organizational systems -- one XML, the other a package of indexed RTF/D files -- and it would be hard to see how the hell DevonThink would handle their data. But DT's inability to read Mellel or Pages 3 files is a big shame. Not DevonTech's fault, I believe, but outside developers not providing plug-ins.

But all in all, with this update DevonThink is IMO still the leader for heavy-lifting of text-based data.  
(Version 1.5)

LEV  A heads-up.

I've been an enthusiastic -- and satisfied! -- user of this excellent app since v1.

But a caveat for anyone thinking of using it with Leopard. So far, Mellel files are not being read by Spotlight, and don't play with QuickLook or CoverFlow.

No word (surprisingly) from the developers on when we can expect this. QuickLook & CoverFlow is manageable, but Spotlight invisibility is a real problem.

So I suggest if you're thinking of getting Mellel -- and it is, as I have said before, a very fine WP indeed -- either stick with Tiger or wait until the developers come out with the requisite plug-in.  
(Version 2.2.7.1)

LEV  Er... no; I think he's comparing things albeit in a fairly superficial way. You know, Preview, PDFPen, Adobe Reader, Skim... at least it's on topic & polite. There's no need to be so minatory and snide.  
(Version 1.0.1)

LEV  My earlier comment about footnotes is out of date and should be dismissed. Sente now does them, and seems to do them fine, although I've only just had a quick look at it.  
(Version 5.1.9)

LEV  Does what it says on the can. Stable, clean and useful -- particularly the ability to attach notes to a particular app. "Magnetic" docking of stickies keeps things neat. All the benefit of Apple stickies, without the clutter. I just wish there was a centralised window to browse ALL notes, as in Edgies. Otherwise, good value and a reasonable price.  
(Version 1.5b6)

LEV  Can't see a great deal of change from the last version - certainly it doesn't feel like an integer upgrade. The main problem with Life Balance has always been the inability to change a group of entries. You have to do each one individually, which can be a pain. The organisation of "places" (what GTD types would call "contexts" is excellent; Contexts can contain other Contexts (for example "Mall" can contain "Kinko's") and hours of business can be set for every Context/Place. Very fine. But the interface seems clunky, and there's no way to get stuff in rapidly as there is in iGTD and the (still in alpha) OmniFocus.

In short, it's a decent app with some unique features - particularly the "life balancing" algorithm which gives it its name - but it's being rather overtaken by other newcomers. I suspect they really need to give it a major overhaul.  
(Version 4.0.1)

LEV  Oops -- should have said "work just fine FOR ME".  
(Version 2.0)

LEV  Hmmm... must be a YMMV problem because tear-off notes (which -- if you've note used it -- turn a note made in Pads X into an independent window, like a Sticky) work just fine in this version. (Using 10.4.10).

A neat little app. Simple, straightforward, seems reliable.  
(Version 2.0)

LEV  Overwritten.  
(Version 1.3)

LEV  I can't go in for all this "creative juices flowing" business. I'm a professional writer. That's how I put bread on the table. I have to do it anyway, creative juices or no.

Organising material is always a chore. At first sight, Schreiberling is a nice solution, halfway between text-only and the complexities of full-bore writers' workbench apps like Scrivener.

It's also exceptionally aesthetically pleasing. So I'm certainly going to give it a go & will report back with, hopefully, a _useful_ review instead of the ad hominem blowhard huffery which seems to be getting all too common round here.  
(Version 1.0.2)

LEV  Re my previous comments -- I bought it. Act of faith but it wasn't much to gamble. Glad I did. Neat, fast, smart, small footprint and excellent for quick jottings.

However... the update doesn't seem to work. "Error extracting" it. I imagine that will get fixed soon, though.  
(Version 2.0.1)

LEV  I'm sorry, but I don't understand. What do you mean, "30 days = serials + registration"?

I don't want to sound harsh, because your licensing model seems generous and your price is fair. But I can't tell, from your [demo], if Schreiben can do what I want it to do. It is like test-driving a car but they won't let you see if fourth gear works and they won't let you turn on the lights. "It'll do that," they say; "buy it and you will find out."

There is no point in having a demo if it doesn't demonstrate what the app can do, surely? Why not just have a demo which expires after 30 days? How does that change your business model?

Perhaps I am being stupid and missing something very obvious, but I really don't understand your point.  
(Version 1.5.4)

LEV  Developer writes "so of course it is a compromise to disable some points - but you can test and use it as long as you want..."

The point is that you (we) CAN'T properly test it and use it because it has been crippled by the developer. Disable some features after 30 days: fine. Don't allow us to test those features: not fine.  
(Version 1.5.4)

LEV  Impossible to review this fairly as the demo is crippled. Does it not open .rtf files because it can't, or because the function has been disabled in the demo? No way to tell.

It might well be a nice and handy little app. I think the developer would do better to put out a time-limited demo, then we could find out.  
(Version 1.4.2)

LEV  The point of your comment, exactly...?

Looks like your brainpatterns aren't complex enough to require Tinderbox. Still, when in doubt, sneer, eh?  
(Version 3.6.2)

LEV  Corrupted my library, crashed itself repeatedly, crashed Word repeatedly, wouldn't work with Mellel, didn't attach pdfs properly... oh, I could go on. I only revisited this achingly terrible app because of the need to collaborate with a colleague; it proved easier, quicker, better and cheaper (WAY cheaper, time being money) to convert said colleague to Bookends.

The whole experience was like meeting an ex in the street and thinking "Wow, was that a lucky escape when we split up." ISI should be ashamed of themselves, but I don't think shame is in their corporate repertoire.  
(Version 10.0.2)

LEV  Absolutely agree. I am in the same position and I feel I am being gouged. Very poor attitude and compares unfavourably with Mellel and Scrivener. Hell, Scrivener, from scratch, is less than what this company is charging for an upgrade.   
(Version 1.0)

LEV  "A is better than B because B is for kiddies", eh? Meaning? Reasons?  
(Version 1.3.6)

LEV  I think so the People which, they are already make's use of a grammar checking, is already also use (Microsoft Word) which it's own "Checker" already in.

Most Mellel users are writers. And nobody messes with *my* grammar.  
(Version 2.2.5)

LEV  Come to that, why not just use Preview? Or Acrobat? On a PC? And write your papers in Excel (after all, it's got text fields)? Outlining? Just use tabs in TextEdit, why not.

Etc.

Yep, in my experience, is better than Yojimbo. Quicker, easier, more "intelligent" and does my stuff. There's always a "why not just..?" to be put forward (why not just retire to the Indian Ocean islands and lead a simpler, better life?) but they're not, generically, very helpful in the long run.  
(Version 1.5)

LEV  As a long-time user of DevonThink, I'm beginning to fret a little. Why?

First, it demands total fidelity. If you live in DevonThink and have just one database, you're fine. But multiple databases ("Which one did I put that thing about iambic hexameter?") or multiple database managers (DT plus Yojimbo, EagleFiler, VoodooPad etc) leave you in trouble for one very simple reason: NO SPOTLIGHT SUPPORT.

Spotlight has changed the way I handle data. Just put it away and it can be found when needed. DevonThink doesn't play. Not "doesn't play nicely". Doesn't play at all. As far as Spotlight is concerned, all that stuff you have in DT just doesn't exist.

This is a major problem. The lack of tagging is another. DT demands that you have a hierarchical folder system, which in turn demands pre-categorizing of data, and, worse, single categorization. Once snippet X is in folder Y, show's over; there are kludges -- "replicants" and "notes" -- but they are... well, they're kludgy.

Devon Tech are falling well behind the curve here. The app is good and stable and some of its functions are excellent. Introduce Spotlight transparency and tagging, and it would be superb. But for now... well, I'm not getting a divorce but I am, shall we say, married-but-looking...  
(Version 1.3.1)

LEV  No ability to format references in footnotes (despite "improved" functionality with Mellel? In that case, still no use in much of the humanities field. Sorry. But I'd love to know what's do very hard about the problem that we're on version 4 and still no progress.  
(Version 4.2.1)

LEV  Downloaded it. Mounted the disk image. Copied the app. Launched it. "Your trial-period for Listz has now expired."

Gosh, does't the time fly by?

It might have been fun but now I'll never know.  
(Version 1.1b2)

LEV  Scrivener is late to the party, and a good thing too. The developer, a writer himself, has listened to what writers want, watched over the shortcomings of other offerings, worked out where his app fits in the workflow (between data-gathering in, in my case, DevonThink and Tinderbox, and final drafting in Mellel) and produced a superb environment for organising information, stitching together the plethora of drafts and rethinks that make up the process, providing a toolkit which is nothing short of extraordinary for a v1.0 product and generall making at least this old scrivener a very happy man.

The app is rock-solid; getting stuff in and out is a snap; the interface is elegant (and the fullscreen mode drop-dead gorgeous) and although there are the inevitable few quibbles the only one I can think of that's particularly significant is the project-wide notes section -- but at least it's got one.

Full outlining, hierarchical structuring, card-index views, a nifty screenwriting module and excellent versioning make this the perfect writers' toolkit. It's a masterly piece of work. As I wrote to the developer during beta testing, any dope can wrie a book (and many of us do) but it takes cojones to build a writing environment like this one. You owe it to yourself to try it.  
(Version 1.0)

LEV  Feedback is fine. Uninformed, lazy feedback, though, doesn't help anyone.  
(Version 3.5.4)

LEV  There seems to be a huge amount of misunderstanding about what Tinderbox actually _is_, partly because, to go beyond the basics (which are themselves pretty powerful) does indeed involve a steep learning curve... as in "learning". Like you have to do with any tool.

And partly because Tinderbox is, in the end, more or less whatever you want it to be. Which is why it takes some learning.

Personally, I can't understand why anyone would spring for a CAD/CAM system or Adobe InDesign. Why? Because I don't need them or use them. I do need and use Tinderbox. Its web features -- handy customizable blogging, for example -- are wasted on me. So I don't use them. But the rest, I _do_ use. Since I first ran across Tinderbox I've used it for two full-length books (and currently on a third) and lord knows how many articles, lectures, papers and what-have-you.

The price question is economics 1.01. For the cost of Tinderbox, a commercial organization will buy approximately 20 minutes of my time. Given slack-time, prep. etc., TInderbox is probably representing a capital outlay of one hour of my time. It has saved me that hour time and again; most recently when I wanted to set up some reasonably complex bibliographic stuff. I could have spent an hour searching for off-the-peg software (though there isn't any); instead, I spent the hour in building it myself in Tinderbox. Job done, and fit for purpose.

In other words, YMMV. Perhaps if people thought of Tbx as an _environment_ rather than a standard app., it might clarify things a bit. I know that about 70% of people I show it to say "Oy gottenyu" or something similar; but 20% say "Hell's teeth, that's EXACTLY what I need."

(The other 10% say "Is that a Mac? There's no software for the Mac.")  
(Version 3.5.4)

LEV  Um... RTFM.

Or should that be RTFMFW?  
(Version 2.1)

LEV  I too make my living by writing, and Mellel is my WP of choice (though there are other tools in my workflow: Yojimbo, Tinderbox, DevonThink and Ulysses).

Luhmann's comment about .doc/.rtf export doesn't chime with my own experience (two full-length books, numerous articles, several scholarly papers) with Mellel. As one would expect, .rtf is much more reliable than .doc, which is a secretive, proprietary format. My stuff involves multiple heading levels, foot- and end-notes, headers & footers (of course), basic (text-only) tables and the odd graphic or image. Admittedly this isn't as complex as some -- I don't use columns, for example -- but all the same it makes the trip from Mellel to Word via RTF smoothly, without problems.

Actually, it's got to the point where I dread finishing stuff because then we have to go into the Beast of Redmond (a.k.a. Wurd) for edits, and in my experience THAT is when things start going wrong. Fortunately my book editor is getting a Mac so we can stay in Mellel until the thing has to go to the printer.

So, once again, my judgment, as Mellel evolves (at astonishing speed and with remarkable stability -- i.e., no crashes/data loss, not once, ever -- for a three-man shop) is that it's the best full-on WP on the market. Integration with Bookends/Sente is superb. The only things I personally miss are change tracking, comments and versioning: all collaboration tools, and all of which will, I have no doubt, come. (For the moment, those lacks are the only reason I give it 4* for features rather than 5*. If you aren't using it for collaborationRedleX delivers what they promise, when they promise it. How many other developers can we say the same about?

Only drawback is something of a learning curve if you want to get its full power and flexibility. But one could say the same about every powerful app.  
(Version 2.1.2)

LEV  The onscreen folding of notes is fine. Small footprint. Nice UI. But for a notepad-type app not to have ANY search capabilities at all is completely inexplicable and renders the app useless for more than a single screenful of notes. Add basic search and it might be quite useful.  
(Version 1.1)

LEV  It says much about the attitude of the developers that they define Mellel 2.1 as a point release when, under the hood, it's in some ways a major rewrite (files now in XML) and introduces equally significant new features, especially the new find/replace schema, which is almost as powerful as the old Nisus Writer (Classic) and ten times more user-friendly. From the geek point of view, these guys are Codemeisters: from the users' point of view, they are the most reliable and helpful developers I have ever dealt with. Mellel continues to surprise and delight me, while being utterly rock-solid (I have never had a crash, a hang or a data loss since v1) and a pleasure to use. Mellel does what a good WP should do: gets out of the way and leaves you to write, while being able to produce typographically superb output if you need it. Interchange with Word (via RTF or, if you want, .doc formats) is excellent. No excuse to continue with the Beast of Redmond any more!  
(Version 2.1)

LEV  You know, that really doesn't help anyone. It's thin, truculent and just vague assertions backed up with nothing tangible. If MacUpdate is to be of any use, those of us who try to post helpful and reasoned reviews should start coming down on people who just use it to assert their opinions in the odd belief that opinion alone is worth something. Why did you bother wasting your time? More to the point, why do you think you're entitled to waste OUR time?   
(Version 0.5.2.1)

LEV  If you don't like it, don't understand it, don't need it or can't afford it, don't buy it. It's not as if they are forcing your money out of your pocket. If you *do* have a use for it, then it's not a high price to pay. Or are you little people so angry because you've got used to something for, if not nothing, then very little? Cost/benefit analysis is the way to go, don't you think?

Oh - and re "I[f] you did not have such a "Major" attitude and scheme I would have been more interested in your product"... see, if *you* did not have such an "Infantile" attitude, I would be more interested in your opinion.

For the grown-ups here: Tinderbox is complex and powerful. I've yet to find something it couldn't do within it parameters of use. But, true, it's not for children. Thank goodness.  
(Version 3.0.6)

LEV  Handsome interface, stable, secure; like the "drop box" for file aliases, and the gallery for pic - accessible from any entry. Purely subjectively, it seems smoother than MacJournal; since I use other apps for the "extra" power of MacJournal, I don't need them for my Day Book and Journal. If you want a catch-all text repository, maybe this isn't for you; but for a dedicated, clean journalling app, viJournal gets my vote.  
(Version 1.6.4)

LEV  The new update (1.2.2) adds a fair bit of extra functionality to what is already one of my professional (I'm a writer) mainstays. The Formatted Text Export plug-in solves a lot of my... well, not "problems" exactly, but things-I-have-learned-to-workaround-or-live-with. It's pretty powerful, though its power only becomes clear after a bit of fiddling around. Fortunately, I like fiddling around.

The app remains unique. Easy to think of it and CopyWrite as basically the same, but they aren't. To explain why in detail would take too much space here; easier to try both for yourself and go with the one that suits your working style.

It's still not ideal for academic writing -- footnotes are still a bit more complex than with e.g. Mellel, which handles them wonderfully -- but if your work involves primarily generating narrative text in the context of longer projects (I use it for both books and newspaper columns) then it's splendidly fuss-free, clean and powerful, and, remarkably, slightly less distracting than an old-fashioned typewriter. Which can only be good for The Flow...  
(Version 1.2.2)

LEV  This doesn't really help anyone. You are comparing two entirely different products that use different approaches to achieve different things. Perhaps you haven't had time to investigate NoteTaker properly (I would imagine that's the case since you don't mention any of its features) but in that case it might be fairer not to say anything at all.

For anyone who doesn't know either app, NoteTaker is a broad and powerful information manager which uses a spiral-bound notebook metaphor. MacJournal is a journalling application. Comparing them as this "reviewer" has done is a bit like saying Word is pointless since you can enter text in Excel...

Oh, the humanity...  
(Version 1.9.10)