Filed under: Software, Education
School days: Mellel & Scrivener
It's that time of year again, academicians. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be highlighting products, tools and techniques to help students and teachers launch into the school year with style and ease. We pointed out Planbook last week, which should make lots of lesson planners happy; I'm going to cheer the hearts of language students with the news of an update to Mellel, the polyglot word processor for Mac, and also point to Scrivener, a powerful project management environment for writers in academic and creative settings.
As Mat mentioned back in March, Mellel is a word processor that keeps the needs of academic writers clearly in focus. First off, it's got the best language support I've ever seen, including full right-to-left script support; it even lets you write in Syriac, which makes my friend Adam extremely happy (he's a scholar of the medieval church, and apparently the correspondence of the day was generally carried out in Syriac -- nobody speaks it today). It's also got powerful style sheet and footnote/endnote tools rolled in, and last week's update to version 2.2.7 enhanced its outlining support with the addition of OPML import and export. At $35 for student licenses ($49 for general use) it's a steal.
A comment on Mat's post suggested Scrivener, which David also noted in February. While it's not a 'final format' word processor, it does provide something special: a complete idea management and organizational environment for writing, including a 'virtual corkboard' for gathering your ideas and a solid research bin for collecting source materials. The program suits those with a more improvisational or bouncy writing style, as you can quickly reorder your work from the corkboard or outline and keep revising the parts that still need more effort. For lightly-formatted writing, you can go straight from Scrivener; for more highly-styled work, the program serves as a nice front end for other tools like Mellel, Final Draft or Word. Like the student edition of Mellel, Scrivener is $35; both programs have demo versions available.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
shawn of the living said 10:24AM on 9-05-2007
Numbers even has a decent GradeBook sheet that keeps up with a classes grades and the weight of each one toward their final grade.
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HandyMac said 12:30PM on 9-05-2007
Mellel has great multilingual support, as shown in the screenshot, except for one large, glaring lack: South Asian languages, i.e. those used and written in India (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, etc.) and its neighbors, from Tibet in the north through Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia (Thai, etc.). Several years ago one of Mellel's developers told me that it would support these scripts in v.2, but such support is still missing.
In general, Apple and Mac developers seem to have neglected/abandoned the Indian/South Asian market (except for Thailand, which does have a strong Mac presence) to Windoze, which seems a shame.
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Nigel said 12:46PM on 9-05-2007
I write technical marketing material for a living, sort of a cross between a technical writer and a copywriter. I've been using Scrivener for all of my projects, large and small, for several months now. It's an amazing piece of software. Well written and well supported, with a very active user forum.
I've tried a lot of other tools that help with the writing process but none of them come close to Scrivener. It's a great place to gather all of your research together and then work on drafts. My clients are all Microsoft shops, so I have to use Word for compatibility, but the heavy lifting of getting to the first draft is done in Scrivener.
If there's one feature I would say is an absolute killer for me, it's the ability to pull a Quicktime recording of an interview into Scrivener and then split screen and transcribe the interview. I'm able to pause, rewind, and fast forward the audio using keyboard commands, without the focus moving from the transcription window. Saves a huge amount of time. I also like that you can import PDF files and then view them in split screen, or use the same forward and back keyboard commands as Safari to quickly navigate between a draft I'm working on and a PDF with input material. Ther's also a full-screen edit feature that I find handy every now and then.
If you are doing any serious writing at all, you owe it to yourself to give Scrivener a try. It's one of my all time favorite Mac apps.
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tersono said 12:55PM on 9-05-2007
Ill agree with the poster who suggested Nisus as an alternative to Mellel. Far superior in my view. Scrivener, however, is a gem - it's worth pointing out that there is also a freeware version of Scrivener called Scrivener Gold. It doesn't have the full range of features, but it's still a nice little app. Worth living with for a while to see if Scrivener's approach suits you before shelling out $35
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Ian Beck said 1:06PM on 9-05-2007
Since the release of Nisus Writer Pro, Nisus Writer has become much more competitive in the academic field, as well. Even before Pro, I vastly preferred Nisus to Mellel because of its interface and general useability.
If you continue this series, don't forget to mention Bookends; probably the best references program out there for Mac in my opinion.
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Nathan Callahan said 3:53AM on 9-06-2007
Another piece of school oriented software that I've found incredibly useful is Schoolhouse from http://www.loganscollins.com/schoolhouse/
It's a very good tool for managing assignments and so forth. Just don't do what I did last semester and not have it running so that it reminds you about what's due and miss a couple of important assignments.
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