The Myth of Limited Software Choice for the Mac

09/17/2005 15:31 Filed in: Technology



"Word processors" hanging out on my PowerBook (from left to right):
MS Word , Mellel , InDesign , Pages , AppleWorks , TextEdit  

When I first began debating about switching to the Macintosh platform in 1998, I asked a friend of mine who was a longtime Mac user if there were any major disadvantages. He explained to me that the downsides to the Mac platform revolved around fewer games and less software choice for standard applications. To illustrate, he said, "You're not going to have a dozen different word processors to choose from like you do with Windows, but if you use Microsoft Word, then you're just fine since it's available for both Windows and the Mac."

Since then, when I've been asked the same question, I have echoed my friend's example. Of course even then, it was a bit of a non-issue. For the average user of 1998 or today, MS Word became the dominant choice for word processing years earlier.

And then today, I came across an interesting website that lists all word processors for Mac OS X. How many would you guess there are? Three? Six? A dozen?

Try 67. That's SIXTY-SEVEN.

Now, granted, the apps listed are of differing abilities ranging from something like Adobe InDesign to simple text editors with MS Word in the middle, but 67 is a mind boggling number. And that doesn't even include an application like iBlog that I'm using to write this blog entry. iBlog is basically an WYSIWYG HTML editor with simple content management system software built in. But I'm not going to write a letter home to Mom in it, so it can't really count as a word processor. But something like InDesign can. Granted, it's geared much more to advanced layout and design uses, but I have seen such software used by secretaries for correspondence. Yes, it's overkill, but it works.

I was curious to know how many word processing applications I have on my PowerBook (which is what I'm writing this on). I found at least six as shown in the graphic above (I think that's more than what I had in my Windows days, for the record). I would even count TextEdit which comes with Mac OS X even though it is not in the list of 67. But it has basic formatting features (bold, italics, etc.) and the ability to save in RTF, Word and even WordXML formats, so I think that counts.

As a side note, lately I've been using Mellel , a word processor geared toward academic use from a company out of Israel. It handles unicode Greek and Hebrew exported from Accordance better than any word processor I've ever seen. And it's built-in bibliographic tools make it the ideal word processor for academic writing on the Mac. Mellel doesn't do everything yet that I need it to do, but the developers have promised most of the features I care about in upcoming updates.

Now, before my Windows-using friends counter that although there are 67 Mac word processors. there are a kabillion Windows word processors... Fine. I know. Yes, I assume that there are more for Windows. But the average person uses ONE, maybe two. Out of 67 for the Mac, I assume that most people can find what they are looking for.