At version 8.5 BBEdit offers quite a surprise, too. The interface has been extensively modified and simplified for both the application and its preferences. For most programs a mention of changed preferences would be a bit silly, but as BBEdit has such an extensive preference set that its preference panel can actually be considered a part of its everyday operation.

Why the new version is numbered 8.5 instead of 9, up from 8.2 is a mystery. Bare Bones offered a .5 upgrade once before when BBEdit was made OS X native. That made sense. That was an important code porting effort but version 6.5 of BBEdit didn’t have a lot of new features over the old 6.

This update is a totally different animal. Besides an interface makeover, BBEdit added some welcome new features. The two most immediately obvious are code folding and menu bar customization.

Code folding, long a selling point for BBEdit’s main competitor TextMate and included with the latest version of Dreamweaver, is great. Toggle a little triangle and blocks of code fold up to un-clutter the workspace. Besides cleaning up a full page of code, the folding feature makes it easy to find closing tags and brackets, or the lack thereof. Its inclusion in BBEdit marks some serious catching up in an essential feature.

The other obvious change is in BBEdit’s new ability to toggle menu bar items. Use subversion or CVS a lot? Switch on a menu list and have it right there for you. Clippings, previously Glossary now has its own menu, which makes it easy to assign keystrokes to invoke commonly used snippets of text or code. Clippings are now easier to access and edit, too. As with most features in BBEdit, these are language sensitive.

Speaking of languages, BBEdit now offers syntax highlighting for Ruby, SQL and YAML. These were available as plugins before but it’s nice to see them incorporated into the core program. Bare Bones is now on the Ruby bandwagon, a place where TextMate has been the main Mac contender.

BBEdit’s already superior search functions have been improved too, adding PCRE and the ability to search and edit .gz files. It offers better JavaScript support, too, though I haven’t had an opportunity to use it yet. I have glanced at the excellent documentation and am looking forward to doing so.

Bare Bones claims almost 200 improvements and new features for BBEdit 8.5. The few I understand had me on the phone within an hour of downloading the demo to purchase my upgrade. Bare Bones forgot to update their shopping cart to include the new version and announce prices. That’s been taken care of but how embarrassing.

This is a major and badly needed update to a fine program that was falling behind in modern features. It has me back firmly in the BBEdit camp.

Web site creation tools fall into two rough categories with a fair amount of overlap. Template based editors are generally the best option for the small site webmaster as they use pre-built designs that allow for almost instant content creation and publishing. WSYIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors allow you to design and position all the page elements. Those offer more flexibility coupled with more work and need for design skill.

Template Based Editors

Template based editors offer the casual or time-strapped webmaster a shortcut for creating web sites. Templates or themes are pre-designed, sidestepping the complex design phase freeing you to simply input your content and click to publish or update a site.

iWeb

Since Apple publishes iWeb it is going to get a lot of press. The main selling point of iWeb is that it lets Apple, or third party, designers provide attractive templates, freeing the end user to add content easily. Design is done by designers and we can create web sites with a minimum of learning and fuss. iWeb is intended to work seamlessly with Apples iApps, which it does. Within this narrow range of expectations, iWeb does what it is supposed to.

iWeb created sites are attractive. Unfortunately, they have some characteristics that make them less than desirable for business use. The main downside to iWeb created sites is that the file sizes of iWeb created web pages are simply too big to download quickly on any but the very fastest internet connections. That fact alone makes iWeb unsuitable for anything but personal web pages.

Other shortcomings include an inability to add raw HTML to a web page. Insulating the average user from coding is an admirable goal but makes it impossible to add third party services like PayPay shopping buttons or YouTube videos. Also, an inability to use semantic page elements hurts search engine friendliness.

Cost: Included with new Mac purchases. Part of the iLife Suite

Bottom Line: iWeb is easy to use and creates attractive web sites. It is fine for personal pages that friends and family are willing to wait for.

Sandvox

Karelia Software’s Sandvox shares much of the ease-of-use of iWeb and manages to address most of its shortcomings. Like iWeb, Sandvox offers professionally designed templates on which the end user can create full websites. Also as with iWeb we are given real time views of what the final site will look like as we are working.

But Sandvox goes a bit farther. Pages can be constructed with Pageltes, building blocks of content that can be added via drag and drop. While iWeb offers easy publishing to .Mac and a more complicated export to other web servers, Sandvox will publish directly to any web server with on click. (prior setup is necessary).

Like iWeb, Sandvox makes inclusion of photos or media files a simple drag and drop affair, as well as offering basic blog features. Also like iWeb Sandvox also offers pre-built design templates. Unlike iWeb, these are not designed by Apple designers and are not quite as polished, though there are more choices. But since Sandvox does not allow any live page design editing the resulting files are of very reasonable size and download speed.

The pro version of Sandvox also allows for raw HTML inclusion, as well as PHP and JavaScript for enhanced functionality. Your web server does have to offer PHP for you to take advantage of this feature. The advanced version also allows for adding HTML tags to the head section of a web page, which helps with search engine friendliness.

Cost: $49 Standard Version – $79 Pro Version

Bottom Line: Sandvox addresses most of iWeb’s shortcomings, though it costs noticeably more. Some of the included templates are acceptable for small business use. Some are quite fun for personal sites. Though none are quite as polished as iWeb’s templates, they are better than anything a non-designer could create.

RapidWeaver

RapidWeaver is a somewhat different animal from Sandvox and iWeb. At version 3.5 it is much more mature and feature rich. But unlike the other two programs it does not offer a real-time preview of you web pages as you work. Editing is done in a word processing like window and you need to click a preview button to see what the finished product will look like. While I don’t consider that a drawback, some do. I believe that separating content creation from design actually frees people from distraction.

RapidWeaver is also a bit more complicated to learn than the other programs, but not terribly so. Basic functionality is easy to grasp without reading the (very good) documentation. Some more advanced editing features, like text wrap around images, require a small bit of digging to uncover.

Like iWeb and Sandvox, RapidWeaver plays well with iPhoto and iTunes, making it straightforward to drag and drop content onto a web page. And also like iWeb and Sandvox, blog publishing, including podcasting is fast and easy to accomplish. The same is true of web photo albums.

Since the program has been around for a couple of years, independent theme designers have had plenty of time to create new page designs. There are easliy over a hundred available at this time and new ones coming out regularly. These themes are sold independently of RapidWeaver but are very inexpensive, running from around $5-$20. Some are very attractive. Most are competent and suitable for a wide range of sites.

RapidWeaver is a rich program and has a number of other features like live PHP rendering and the ability to easily mix HTML directly into a page. It also has a plug-in acrhitecture that lets third party developers create add-ons like Blocks, a free-form editing tool.

Cost: $39.95

Bottom Line: RapidWeaver is a very capable web site creation program, fully suitable for the small business owner who wants to be able to build a professional site without learning learning web design.

Goldfish

Another template based web site creation program is Goldfish, which also allows for some actual page design customizing.

Goldfish gets around iWeb’s large file size by limiting the background image editing functionality and produces web pages of reasonable download size. But the downside of this is that most of the templates available for the program are very basic. Depending on the design skills you bring to the project, that is either a plus or a minus. Goldfish is not just a template based site creation tool but a web page layout program, albeit a very basic one.

Ease of use is excellent. As with all of these programs, integration with Apple’s system is straightforward. Code inclusion is also available for easy inclusion of third party web content and services.

Cost: $34.95

Bottom Line: If page layout control appeals to you more than pre-built professional designs, Goldfish is worth a look. It has enough functionality for a range of sites and allows more design flexibility than RapidWeaver or Sandvox, though fewer other features.

WYSIWYG Editors (what you see is what you get)

WYSIWYG editors leave you free to build your own site your own way and take care of the coding part for you behind the scenes. They’re what the average person thinks of first for web site creation. They allow for more freedom of creative design expression than the template based programs but leave you to take care of more of the details like internal links and image resizing.

Seamonkey

[Seamonkey](http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/_ is the direct descendent, and most current version, of the Netscape and Mozilla suites of web applications. Seamonkey contains a module for web site editing and creation, called Composer. According to the Seamonkey page:

SeaMonkey’s powerful yet simple HTML editor keeps getting better with dynamic image and table resizing, quick insert and delete of table cells, improved CSS support, and support for positioned layers. For all your documents and website projects, Composer is all you need.

It may not be all you need for a large or complex site but Seamonkey Composer is more than adequate for the typical business brochure or personal website. It provides a competent WYSIWYG editor and support for direct code and CSS editing.

Where Composer shines is in updating existing web pages. Navigate to the site in the web browser component, Navigator, select Edit Page from the File menu and the page opens up in full editing mode. If you have the site login information entered in Seamonkey, simply edit the page and click the Publish button for instant gratification.

The editing environment has the full range of text editing capabilities as well as easy image inclusion, and table and link creation.

Cost: Free

Bottom Line: Seamonkey Composer is an excellent tool for updating web sites and an competent tool for building sites from scratch, though its cousin NVU is better suited to that task.

Nvu

Nvu is another offshoot of the old Netscape Composer component. Nvu is a stand-alone program with versions for Mac, Windows and Linux. Created by the Linspire people. The site claims that Nvu is “A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.”

That’s hyperbole. Nvu is a very nice WYSIWYG web editing program, though it comes nowhere close to Dreamweaver or Frontpage in capability or polish. It does have an perfectly capable set of features for the one-site webmaster. It is also easier to use than Dreamweaver. The cost of extra features is extra complexity and a steeper learning curve. From the Nvu site:

WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.

Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.

Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today’s most popular browsers.

Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.

Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.

Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.

Cost: Free

Bottom Line: For the non-professional web designer or webmaster, Nvu offers a competent editor at an unbeatable price. While it doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML or web coding to operate, a little knowledge would help you make a better site, but that’s true of most web design programs.

Freeway

Freeway is actually two program, Express and Pro, but the Freeway website presents them as one with different versions so that’s how I’ll address them here. Softpress claims that “Freeway 4.2 is a Universal Application developed to be the fastest, easiest, most powerful way to design and build new websites.” That’s close to true if, by that, they mean build from scratch, though, Nvu claims the same thing. Compared to the template based web site creation programs it is quite complicated to learn.

Freeway is a designer’s tool, that completely insulates the end user from code. It works very much the same way as a page layout program like InDesign or Xpress and should be pretty easy for people comfortable with those programs to transfer their skills to. If you have good graphic design skills, Freeway will let you exercise them fully.

An advantage that Freeway offers over most web programs is that it has quite capable image editing features built in, especially for graphically displayed text. These features may save you the need to use an external image editing program.

Freeway gives very exacting layout control through either table based layout or absolutely positioned divs. That may give the print designer transferring her skills to the web a warm fuzzy feeling, but makes for somewhat brittle page layouts. Things look great until the end user decides to make the text larger (or smaller), or turns off images for increased download speed. Absolutely sized and positioned page elements are great if the visitor leaves the page the way you designed it, but don’t look so nice if the text they are containing is resized. Freeway Pro does offer the ability to specify relative element sizes, which to some extent offsets this problem.

Freeway Express gives users the layout features to create web sites. Freeway Pro offers a more special text effect options as well as a more flexible workspace and CSS layout capability and output options.

Cost: Freeway Express $99 – Freeway Pro $279

Bottom Line: For years, Freeway offered the only option between hand coding and professional level and cost web design programs. It still occupies that niche but has some solid competition from the template based programs. If you are a graphic designer who wants to build an occasional website, or want to really design, not just build your site, Freeway is an excellent option.

Dreamweaver

Survey a large group of web designers and chances are 80% of them use Dreamweaver for at least part of their work. Dreamweaver is the industry standard.

Does that mean you should go out and get a copy if you want to build a website? Only if you want to become a pro web designer. Dreamweaver is a large, capable and feature rich program that really rewards the designer/developer who knows the field.

Dreamweaver does offer a WYSIWYG design mode that is excellent. It is quite possible for someone with little or no HTML knowledge to use Dreamweaver. But the cost and the learning time involved in getting up to speed with Dreamweaver make every other option described so far more appealing.

Where Dreamweaver shines is as a production tool for large sites or for integrating dynamic content into a website. It has good site management capabilities and very good integration with two other web design standards, Flash and Fireworks. The list of features goes on and on.

Want to use PHP, SQL, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Cold Fusion? Dreamweaver is the ticket. Don’t even know what those terms mean? Dreamweaver is overkill.

Cost: $399

Bottom Line: If you are a professional web designer chances are that you already use Dreamweaver or are a hardcore hand coder. If you are a single site webmaster, consider other options.

Contribute

Adobe’s Contribute is really not a website creation tool but an maintenance one. It is excellent for updating or adding to sites created with Dreamweaver. Like Seamonkey’s Composer, it allows you to browse to a web page and edit it in a simple but capable editor. But it won’t let you touch the design elements of a page, just the content.

If you are maintaining your own site, Composer is free and quite capable. If you are working on a company or organization site, Contribute offers some distinct advantages, like version control, locked page elements and backups.

Cost: $149

Bottom Line: If you hire a designer to create your website but want to maintain it yourself, Contribute will allow you to do so without the steep learning overhead of Dreamweaver.

GoLive

Before Adobe bought Dreamweaver and its parent company, GoLive was its only real competitor. Now with two industrial strength web design programs in Adobe’s stable, GoLive’s future is uncertain. That’s a shame.

GoLive is every bit as capable as Dreamweaver. Some things, such as integrating with other Adobe programs like Photoshop and InDesign it does brilliantly. GoLive also has the best site management features in the industry.

As a web development platform for dynamic sites, Dreamweaver excels. But for static website creation and maintenance, it’s pretty much a tossup. I have used both and whenever I switch, I always miss a feature in one that the other offers.

GoLive offers the same benefits and downsides as Dreamweaver. It is a big and complex program that offers capabilities that the occasional web designer will not even know are there or how to use.

A number of people have GoLive as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. If you are one of those people, it might be worth using GoLive. You already own it. Or, if you are a graphic designer who uses InDesign, the tight integration between the programs would make GoLive an obvious fit.

Cost: $400

Bottom Line: GoLive is equivalent to Dreamweaver in most web design functions and offers some unique benefits. With its future uncertain, I wouldn’t recommend buying a new copy. If you already own it, don’t switch to Dreamweaver unless you want to develop database served content.

Markdown is a simple page formatting syntax and a Perl script that converts the Markdown markup to HTML. The script runs in either BBEdit or TextWrangler. It is also offered as a plugin for a number of blogs and CMS’s.

Much of the markup that Markdown uses is implicit. Two carriage returns automatically insert paragraph tags. Adding a couple of spaces at the end of a line creates a br tag.

The rest is simple. Add a # or a * in front of a line and Markdown surrounds that block of text with h1 tags. Two ##’s make h2 tags, three ###’s make h3 tags and so on. A > creates a blockquote and a numbered list is automatically turned into an HTML numbered list. You get the idea. A complete syntax style guide is included at the author John Gruber’s site. Though fewer than 10 tags handle common formatting chores. This is simple, folks.

With Markdown it is fast and simple to use a text editor to write semantically correct HTM as quickly or more quickly than it would be to use menus in Word or TextEdit to format the text for printing. It is almost too cool for words.

Don’t get me started with the idea of composing in TextWrangler with Markdown, then copying the resulting page out of Safari into TextEdit. That can actually be faster than trying to create a structured document in TextEdit using styles and the mouse, especially if you want to include hyperlinks in the document.

The great thing about using Markdown while writing is that it is drop dead simple to format a page for HTML while writing. It makes Dreamweaver seem glacial by comparison. But that’s pretty much the case whenever a function can be accessed via the keyboard. WYSIWYG editing is wonderful for its short learning curve but, once learned, a markup protocol like Markdown is so much faster.

Don’t even think of comparing Markdown and the slow and clunky JavaScript editors included with content management systems. Everything I use, including Wordpress and Drupal has a Markdown plugin installed.

Today, I got a Word document that I needed to turn into a website. It is a novel about 450 pages long, that will end up as about 20 web pages, one per chapter.

I broke the file down, one new document per chapter. The initial plan was to use Word’s HTML export function then clean up the pages in Dreamweaver, using its clean Word HTML feature. What a pain.

Section one was 69 pages in Word. That exported to a 1.3 MB file, a bit big for quick loading. Cleaning up the junk that Word threw into the page helped quite a bit. The new file was only 800 KB or so. That’s a lot smaller but not even in the ballpark for a reasonable load time. Add to that the fact that Dreamweaver was molassas slow with a file that size and the thought of trying to continue this way was not appealing.

Next I tried the Word HTML cleaner function of Tidy. It never even got through the file, just died on me. That was both with the stand alone program and with the BBEdit plugin BBTidy. Not looking good.

Just for reference, Word had decided that the page needed 29 separate classes and thousands of font and span tags. No wonder the file was so large. Back to square one.

Looking at the document there didn’t need to be more than three levels of styled headings, two paragraph styles, a blockquote and styled pre tags for some embedded poetry. That’s really a very simple document. It turned out that the easiest solution was to use Markdown in Word, then copy and paste the file into BBEdit for some search and replace.

It had to start in Word, or another rich text editor. The big problem was that the author used a lot of italics, that needed to be addressed somehow. The italics would have been lost if the contents had been moved into BBEdit first. So the initial step went through Word. Fortunately, most of the italicized words were foreign, either Serbian or German and there was a glossary included. So an hour of global search and replace put about half the italics (em) Markdown syntax in place. Another three hours of hand editing got the rest. But the worst part was over.

There was some more search and replace in BBEdit to get the rest of the Markdown syntax in place, mostly making sure that there were the proper number of line breaks. This was also an opportunity to place a “go to page top” link between each section.

With the page marked up, running the Markdown script only took a few seconds for each page. There were now twenty long pages of text, 99% web ready, with all the tags and back to page top in place, ready to paste into the template pages.

Since the page templates were quite simple, it only took another hour and a half to get the content pages, home page and TOC ready for the book. The it was just copy and paste 20 time and the site was up. None of the finished pages exceeded 125 KB in size, which is less than a 10th of what Word was able to produce.

That was one work day to convert 180,000 + words into a complete web site with at total of 22 pages, 20 pages of content a cover page and a contact page. That included over 400 internal links. Score one for Markdown. (and BBEdit’s regular expression search and replace engine)

Why would you want to? Google Video, YouTube, Odeo, Flickr, RSS Feeds, Del.icio.us, PayPal, blog exchanges and a host of services give us little copy and paste snippets of code that let us add features or content to our web pages. Can’t do that with iWeb, not unless you buy a copy of iWeb Enhancer. It is a necessary tool for any iWeb user who wants to enrich their website while still enjoying the ease and simplicity of iWeb.

iWeb Enhancer isn’t a plugin for iWeb. We are required to create a rounded triangle, place the code in it. Export from iWeb, then run iWeb Enhancer. It works but is far from elegant. But that’s what Apple offers and the publishers have made it as easy as possible.

If you can accept iWeb’s many other limitations and would like to join the web community at large, this is the only option available.

Acceptable

[rate 3.0]

You don’t want to see Adium or iChat flashing to tell you that somebody has IM’d, or your Entourage icon jumping in the dock. You don’t even need to see that Mail has 6 new messages queued and ready for your reply.

You need basic text editing with spell checking. And, you want the rest of your computer to go away for a while.

Enter, WriteRoom, a free program from HogBay Software (donations requested). WriteRoom is a plain text editor that shows old fashioned green text on a black background that covers the entire monitor. WriteRoom lets you write without distractions.

This certainly isn’t a unique feature. CopyWrite, Jer’s Novel Writer, even DEVONthink offer this. But these other programs have other functions that can intrude on the simple act of composition. WriteRoom doesn’t.

It’s features are limited to choosing the font face, color and size and the writing space width and height. It imports plain text and RTF files and exports .txt documents. That’s about it. But this is a case where less is more. The lack of distractions is refreshing. The scrollbar even disappears until you move the cursor over it, a nice touch. This review is written in WriteRoom.

There is an odd behavior I noticed, though I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature. Using the keyboard command, Command + W makes the writing space disappear. The document has not been placed in the dock. It has not been saved. There is no save option. When WriteSpace is opened again, all previous documents show up again on the screen. Documents are not saved. They are exported and exist until explicitly deleted. If you start a dozen documents without deleting them you will find a dozen open documents next time you use the program. It’s not particularly annoying but it is different.

Originally, I didn’t see the font choice in preferences but it’s there. (thanks for Nick’s quick response to my post on the HogBay forum) All of your fonts are available. I chose the system font, Lucida Grande over Courier that is the default choice.

Since I don’t like writing on the bottom of the screen, I find that I set the page height a little smaller than I like to keep the bottom margin off the bottom of the screen. I would like to be able to set the bottom margin separate from the top.

But, that is a small complaint and I’ll continue to use it. The simplicity is appealing and the full screen editing works well.

There’s one more nice feature. Since this is a Cocoa application, OS X Services work with it. Add in the HumaneText.service and a keyboard command for it and WriteRoom can access Markdown to generate HTML formated copy in a couple of seconds.

Recommended

[rate 4.0]

Sandvox is aimed at pretty much the same target market as iWeb, though this time it appears that Apple’s development was really independent of Karelia’s. But iWeb comes bundled with iLife and new Macs while Sandvox costs $40. The question is whether or not Sandvox offers enough for the money to build a viable market.

From a web designer’s standpoint, this is a much, much better program. It builds sites with clean code and attractive designs. Unlike iWeb it doesn’t try to make web design emulate standard page layout. That may seem restrictive to the uninitiated but it does mean that the pages created by Sandvox are markedly better as web pages. Besides the cleaner and semantically correct code, which the average person won’t care about, it makes lean, fast loading pages. There are no background images that consume hundreds of kilobytes of bandwidth. Put simply, web sites created by Sandvox actually work for the average visitor and won’t choke lower speed internet connections.

Sandvox comes with a number of attractive templates that range from professional to fanciful. And, unlike iWeb, new templates are reasonably easy for an experienced designer to create. I could see creating a site for a client and giving them a copy of Sandvox to maintain it.

Sandvox offers some nice features like photo albums, RSS, site upload, podcasting/video, embedded pages, site maps and connections to external services like digg. These can be created in new pages or added as subsections of existing pages. Click to insert and your pages are expanded. It also has drag and drop from either the finder or a media browser. This is an easy program to use.

Like iWeb, Sandvox builds web pages without tables. But it does allow much less customization of the final web site. Text formatting is defined by the style sheets. Period. Text cannot be resized within a section, nor can it be colored or have its alignment altered. As a designer, I can appreciate the strict control over the output. I wonder, though, if this is going to seem too restrictive to many end users. I love lists and wouldn’t but a program that excluded them from my formatting options.

I would like to see right or centered text justification built in along with the ability to include headers, lists and blockquotes. It’s great to enforce a set style on a site but these are common formatting or page elements, that simply need to be available.

Well, they are, sort of. The “Pro” version of Sandvox allows access to a page’s HTML and a style-less view. Karelia mentions other “advanced” features for the Pro version but I can’t find them. But we have quickly left the easy-to-use realm and added $40 to the programs price for the privilage.

Sandvox will create attractive web sites, easily and with a short learning curve. It has a full compliment of multimedia features and site extras. However, its inexplicable lack of basic formatting options goes too far in the directon of style control.

In competition with the (basically) free iWeb and the more mature and feature rich RapidWeaver, Sandvox may have a problem gaining acceptance. That would be a shame. With just a bit more in the way of formatting features it could be an excellent web design program for many people.

Publisher: Karelia Software
Mac OS X 10.4 required, Universal Binary.

Ease of use: 5
Features: 3
Value: 3
Documentation: 3

It may or may not be a good fit.

All of these programs have their special strengths, but the basic truth about all word processors is that they focus on a foundation of document layout and styling. These programs are as much typesetting and page formatting tools as they are writing tools. Styles, columns, headers, footers, page numbers, fonts, tables and so on are all important for the finished document but they can be a distraction when engaged in the actual process of writing.

Over the past few years, Mac programmers have been looking at what is important to writing, separated from page formatting.

The first application that was specifically created for writers was a simple shareware program, Z-Write. To my knowledge, it is the only writing specific tool that predated OS X. Its author, Mark Zeedar, created the ground work on which subsequent programs have built. He states:

In the process of writing a story, writers tend to create dozens or even hundreds of pages of notes, character bios, rewrites, reminders, and bits of research info. Organizing all that material within the linear structure of a traditional word processor is awkward at best.

That works well to define the writing tool genre. What all these programs share is a method for adding notes, and chapters and creating multiple parts of a larger work.

When writing a longer work, most writers don’t just start at the beginning and write through to the end. The creative process seldom runs in that straight a line. There are digressions, skips ahead or back in the document, notes to take and refer to, speculations and a whole host of unexpected random thoughts that need to be recorded, right now, before they’re lost. There are outlines, character sketches, background materials, references and the other details unique to a particular writing style or job. You can create all those in separate Word files but it sure isn’t easy to keep track of.

Bottom line, writing is messy and a writing tool needs to be flexible enough to let writers work with rather than against it.

In addition to making non-linear writing easier, a writer’s tool should get out of the way. All those buttons on Word or Appleworks just beg to be clicked. And it’s much easier to fall back on formatting that to actually write new content or, harder still, edit.

So, a simple interface is good. Better still is the ability to write in full screen mode. Those old enough to remember the initial computer monitors with their glowing green text on a black background will feel right at home with modern full screen mode. The text takes over the entire screen. You can’t see the desktop or dock. You won’t know if someone has emailed or IM’d you. There’s just the screen and you wrestling, mano a mano, to get the words down in good order. It helps.

There are currently four general purpose programs for writers in active development. The old Z-Write is still around and will run on OS X, but hasn’t been updated since 02. And it lacks some of the features found in newer programs.

I love to review programs but am going to pass on assessing the values or features on these. Writing is such a personal process that something that drives me batty will be exactly what you love. They all work and could be just the thing you’re looking for. I will say that I use CopyWrite. For me, it hit that sweet spot of features, price and ease of use. But there are no bad programs in the bunch. All of them, except Ulysses, offer basic formatting options like bold, italics, and text alignment. They all have spell checking and export to RTF or Word format.

Jer’s Novel Writer

This is beta software and until it reaches final release, it’s free. There’s a lot to like in Jer’s Novel Writer. It’s elegant and simple to use. It adapts well to those who like to just get started and add notes and structure later. It offers:

• Margin Notes like you’ve never seen before.
• Automatic Outline
• Full-screen mode
• Database
• Bookmarks
• General notes
• Word and page count
• Chapters or any document structure.

Avenir $19.99

Avenir is a little more sophisticated than Jer’s Novel Writer. But then you are paying for it. In addition to writing tools, Avenir works as a sort of project manager for writing. It includes Tasks with completion status. I also has in a very clever way to combine outlines of various saved general notes.

Avenir also goes the farthest of all the applications towards creating a specific kind of editor ready document, with Word format export and page numbers. Ulysses has many more export formats.

I found this application to be not quite as stable as the others. However, it has been updated since I kicked its tires, so it may be better.

CopyWrite
$29.99

For a bit more you get a bit more. I found this to be the most polished of the programs in the field. However, it does not export to MS Word format, only RTF. Since I do final document formatting in Word anyway, that is no barrier to me.

One unique feature of CopyWrite is its find feature which works much like that in Mail. It’s handy for finding all the instances of any word or phrase. It also has a “timeline” that shows how far a project has progressed. Say you want to write 5 sections for an article, Copywrite shows a progress bar with percentage completion based on sections, or chapters or whatever you set.

Also helpful are the version control and auto backup.

Ulysses 100.00 € (about $120)

I don’t know what makes this program worth the appreciably higher cost. It has no formatting functions at all and less point and click functionality than Avenir or CopyWrite. What it does have is excellent Applescript support and more export options, including LaTEX. That makes me think that the target market is TEX geeks and people who want to automate some portions of the writing/export process.

That said, Ulysses does just fine as a writer’s tool. It has notes, searching, chapters, and split screen that lets you see two differ portions of the same document or two different documents at the same time.

If it works for you then the extra $90-$100 probably will be forgotten when you sell your next piece.

All of these programs offer free limited time trials. Download them. Kick the tires. And happy writing.