School days: Mellel & Scrivener

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Numbers even has a decent GradeBook sheet that keeps up with a classes grades and the weight of each one toward their final grade.