What to tell him... - Angostura-3

Tell him it's free and will run under Rosetta emulation. So all he has to do is download it and see if it runs fast enough. I'm sure it will be usable on a Mini (especially if its a dual core). App load times might be slow; it's a pretty long process on my 800MHz G4, but once started texediting will be OK.

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Tuesday, March 21 2006 @ 12:54 PM PST

Universal Binary? - biob

I have been bug testing this program for a while now. There is no way to run it on the Intel-based Macs at the moment, for a variety of reasons. The official stance on this is to use the Mac port of Open Office. NeoOffice does not run under Rosetta as one person suggested. Check out bugzilla.neooffice.org for more information.

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Tuesday, March 21 2006 @ 01:07 PM PST

Universal Binary? - Angostura-3

Oops, thx for setting me straight on Rosetta, a bad assumption on my part.

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Tuesday, March 21 2006 @ 01:26 PM PST

Universal Binary? - lovenotfear

Tell him to grab TextWrangler if he's looking for a good free text editor. Now universal Binary.

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Tuesday, March 21 2006 @ 02:40 PM PST

Universal Binary? - mneptok

jEdit is a better bet than is TextWrangler. TW is a feature-stripped BBEdit, and is meant to be a free taste of BareBones software that gets people to pony up cash for BBEdit.

jEdit is free, open source, and feature complete. Not to mention it runs on any OS that has a JRE.

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Tuesday, March 21 2006 @ 03:07 PM PST

Universal Binary? - Dr. Faustroll

I suspect what you are referring to is a wordprocessor, not a programming editor - if I'm wrong about this, I'll second the recommendation for TextWrangler (much faster and better designed than jEdit).

Your friend might start by seeing whether TextEdit (included for free with OS X) does everything they need it to do - it only includes basic features, but frequently that is all that is needed by many people.

Should they need a more powerful feature set, they might want to look at AbiWord - free, and quite powerful.

If your friend is willing to spend a (reasonable) amount of money in exchange for products that are well-designed and well-supported, I would recommend they take a look at Mellel and Pages (part of Apple's iWork suite). These two products are very different from each other - some people will love one and hate the other - but both are excellent tools in their own right. Both have free trial versions (Pages should have been included with your friend's Mini), so try-before-you-buy is painless.

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Tuesday, March 21 2006 @ 03:26 PM PST

Universal Binary? - sdfisher

You're joking, right? If OOo isn't Mac-like enough, why the heck would JEdit be worth using? JEdit is sluggish and horribly ugly.

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Saturday, May 06 2006 @ 04:57 PM PDT

Universal Binary? - pvenkman

For a good text editor for Mac I would recommend either Nisus Writer Express or Mellel. The former is more intuitive and straightforward and translate/exports to Word more seemlessly. The latter is more robust especially if you work with multi-languages and have bibliographic needs. Bookends, found at www.sonnysoftware.com, is closely integrated with Mellel not so with Nisus.

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Wednesday, March 22 2006 @ 05:09 AM PST

Universal Binary? - mark_hilton_xiamen

I have Nisus Writer Express, Mellel, Pages and Neo-Office, Papyrus Works, Mariner Write, and I used to use Thinkfree Office, as where I worked provided a Chinese Windows box. I also use TextWrangler. A couple of years back, I tried Abi-Word but couldn't get on with it at all.
I also write in multiple languages, mostly English and Simplified Chinese, but also other European languages. I seem to remember Abi-Word didn't support Chinese.
Each has its advantages. Nisus is the most intuitive and is the one I prefer. It sometimes has trouble with tables in documents imported from Word (Chinese Windows version). You can't flow text round graphics and it doesn't have an outline mode. The other thing about Nisus is that its native file format is RTF, so sharing documents is seamless.
Mellel, I used for some time, but it doesn't work with Word docs in Chinese--they come out in UTF8 code listing. You have to open them in TextEdit, save them out as RTF and then open that, which is a real bore. I also find the interface too complex, but then I no longer use it much, and it has its own proprietory document format, so you have to export if you want to share your documents with non-Mellel users ... On the other hand it is cheaper than Nisus.
Pages does a better job of opening Word files with tables in than Nisus, but it too has its own document format, so you have to export in order to share. Word docs exported from Pages won't open in Nisus, so somewhere there is a coding problem. And although some of the templates look good, in my experience, if you modify one, when you open a new page it has the original layout, not your modified layout. When you buy it, you get Keynote as well ... that was why I have it. If you don't need Keynote, it is a rather expensive option.
Neo-Office is very compatible and it is free. But you have to work with an unattractive Windows/X-windows type interface which is particularly irritating in terms of file-management, and it is sloooow, particularly to start up.
There are a number of other alternatives:
Mariner Write, by Mariner Software is a very stable Word clone ... it's a carbon app rather than cocoa so the interface is less pretty, but it works very well.
Papyrus Works is free ... available from Lemkesoft (of Graphic Converter fame). I haven't used it much, but it seems to be stable and generally compatible. It has a 35$ big brother with extra features.
Thinkfree Office is a cross-platform MSOffice clone, which for around 65$, if I remember rightly, comes with a one-year renewable use of 100MB of space on their server, which is integrated into the system. Once you have paid your subscription and got your licence key, you can download and use as many copies as you like on whatever platform, and they will all connect to your space on the Thinkfree server system. The interface is Windows-style, though. Thinkfree didn't support Chinese, though I could use it to transfer files from my work machine to my own TiBook.
For a free, Aqua-interface app, Papyrus Works might well be the best bet.
Good luck
Mark

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Saturday, March 25 2006 @ 05:27 AM PST

Universal Binary? - Cattus Thraex

Your friend wishes a free, perfect, mactel compatible office suite? He/she should wait. For the time being, Nisus, Mellel and, of course, MS Office may do the job very well, even if in Rosetta (bar Nisus, which is UB).
The great potential of mactels will be fully exploited when great companies will post their UB versions, some time later in 2006 or even 2007, that depends on many things. Life is not easy for developers, you know.

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Saturday, March 25 2006 @ 01:33 PM PST

Universal Binary? - twoweims_1

How about TextEdit.app? It was free with his new Mac, and a lot more powerful than it looks.

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Thursday, March 30 2006 @ 03:12 PM PST

Universal Binary? - twoweims_1

How about TextEdit.app? It was free with his new Mac, and a lot more powerful than it looks.

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Thursday, March 30 2006 @ 03:12 PM PST

Universal Binary? - NaOH

Indeed, the TextEdit.app actually reminds me of Word 5.1.

Even though we're talking nearly 10 years ago, I think it's worth noting that these days 80% of Word users, use about 20% of the features.

(Not to mention the fact that TextEdit.app can open and edit most simple Word files.)

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Thursday, March 30 2006 @ 04:31 PM PST