myWritings for Mac

Please note that these comments are for version 1.3.3, which runs on OS X 10.5 I have no interest in upgrading to 10.6 or 10.7, so the lack of development compatible with an older OS is a minus. In contrast, Word, Scrivener, Mellel, Nisus Writer, and others, work fine in OS X 10.5.x and, except for Word, all are still offering PPC compatibility. There’s no button to Save or Cancel Preferences. These are saved by closing the Window. Working with Tables via a Contextual Menu is clumsy. There’s no Tables menu. There is a sort of Table “inspector” but it is not very refined. There is Table under the Format Menu. If you choose it when no table is selected, it will create a new table. Quite different form other applications which include a Table menu item and commands such as “New Table,” "Insert Table" or “Draw Table” Opening Word documents results in missing information (e.g., formats, headers, footers, graphics, margins). The statement from a previous review that “anyone can use this in place of Word” is a bit naïve. As the developer mentions in the Help, “myWritings is not designed and written to replace Word.” This becomes evident when dealing with certain tasks. For example, I found no way to include drop-down lists within a document, or merge data from other sources for letters, labels, or envelopes. I know it’s popular among Mac users to bash Microsoft. Although I’ve used Macs 95% of the time for over a decade, I actually like Microsoft and use Office regularly. In this case, the developer pretty much says that Word suffers from a cluttered interface and speed issues (among other things). I don’t find Word’s interface cluttered, and interestingly while doing a test of speed myWritings performed very poorly against Word. I tried to open a 3.1 MB TXT document in myWritings. After 4 minutes of the spinning beach ball I had to Force Quit the application. Word opened it in under 10 seconds. I gave myWritings another shot, and this time I only waited a minute before doing a Force Quit. I then tried it with a DOC file saved before with myWritings. It went from 1 MB originally to close to 900 KB after saving, probably due to lost formatting, headers, footers, etc. I was unable to check since after selecting to view the header I only got the spinning beach ball again! Word opened the file in 9 seconds, and myWritings took 13 seconds. After relaunching the app, using Open Recent it took 11 seconds. In Word this took 7 seconds. I decided to find and replace some random text. There were 187 instances of the text. Word took about 2 seconds while myWritings took about 6 seconds. I won’t rate it since MacUpdate does not allow to choose which version is being rated, and my comments are for 1.3.3 and not 2.1. Maybe 2.1 is better. Does this offer any advantage over the above mentioned alternatives? Perhaps price, but Bean is free. I prefer Word, Mellel, or Nisus Writer by far. Based on this brief test and the speed, (in)stability, and (lack of) features, I would give this 2½ stars at best. Again, perhaps the new version is better.

Very impressed by this app - so much functionality in such a small straightforward UI. I particularly like the fact that you can set the default file format to be .doc, which means that anyone can use this in place of Word. One issue, however, is that the app does not seem to load Word's .doc files accurately where headers and footers are concerned - they appear at the end of the text. Any chance of fixing this?

"Mac OS 10.6.6 or later" Ouch! I do not want to upgrade to the App store OS! A pity, this is a great app.

This is a very tempting and sylish app. As a French professional writer and literary translator, i would definitely pay for MyWritings, adopt it for my daily needs and become and ardent supporter of it with my colleagues, if it was fully compatible with Spark's keyboard shortcuts (see below), Antidote's editing and dictionary functions and had several additional features. The following is a bit long as i tried to put things in context. Preliminary explanations for what i lack with the current version of Mywritings: - As a professional Mac user, i do most things via the keyboard, to save time and my carpal tunnel, so i use Spark to create kb shortcuts. - In my job, I very often have to edit texts, and look for words/synonyms, which i do via the correction and editing software Antidote. I found my Spark shortcut for « launch Antidote, paste word from scrapbook (in Antidote’s dictionary seach field) and hit enter (to make Antidote look for the word) » doesn’t work within MyWritings. Also, contrary to what happens with most other apps, in Mywritings, the Services Menu for Antidote is only available through a mouse click => keyboard-shortcut-unscriptable via Spark, which kills this alternative solution for Antidote word lookup via a Spark shortcut.) => The features requests: 1. Ccompatibility with Spark so as to perform complex « text » shortcuts. Mywritings currently allows only simple Spark « application » shortcuts to Antidote, to launch the app for instance, but not complex time-saving « text shortcuts ». [NB : Complex Spark « text shortcuts » do work from MyWritings to at least Camino (i just tested one i have for a word lookup).] 2. Direct Integration with Antidote’s « Dictionnaire » function, which would allow to go back and forth between the two apps to look for a definition or synonym and then use the « replace text » function from Antidote to MyWritings. Such Integration is fairly simple to obtain from the folks at Druide, i guess, as many word processing apps (Open Office, for instance) are integrated that way). 3. Ideally, same as 2 for the « Correcteur » function of Antidote (which would make both software fully compatible). This function allows a very wide and efficient editing of texts in French (spelling, repetitions, style, grammar corrections and even deeper meaning stats and functions) and i guess that also implies being able to change text back and forth between the two apps. 4. Realtime spelling corrections in French (as in OpenOffice for instance - may be there is some code / dictionary list to borrow there?) 5. (optional for me as i am bilingual but would be necessary for a significant number of colleagues) : French localization. NB: Sent a message today via the app's "provide feeback" function to the app's creator with roughly the same remarks. Will let you know what he says (he is very fast in answering, from what i gathered from a previous exchange with him - to me, the presence of a "provide feedback" function is in itself a very good sign).

Note to Developer: Thank you for continuing to develop and polish myWritings! My wish list for myWritings: *Under info button, for text frequency: have the option of word count per 1000 words. *Add a dictionary button to the toolbar. *Add an underline color button to the toolbar. *Add insert line or column to table commands *Use a brighter electric blue for the app icon (More colorful!) *Lastly, for your default set of icons for the toolbar, include a customize button on the end.