I've written a few times about my move away from MS Word and to Mellel. For those Mac users out there--especially those involved in any kind of academic writing--who are still on the fence, I thought this short message posted by Ori Redler on the RedleX Yahoo Group may give you some good insight into where this software is going:

Just to clarify things a bit: Yes, we do intend to make Mellel a viable alternative to FrameMaker; No, we have absolutely no intention to make it a DTP machine.

I think that with Mellel 2.0 we've reached our initial target -- making Mellel a good, solid word processor.

From here on, we plan to move along the three fronts we've defined:
A. "For scholars" -- adding tools that will make Mellel an even better tool for scholars, especially better bibliography integration, index, cross-references, more notes options, etc.
B. "For long document" -- ...in addition to the options mentioned above, a better solution for "book" management, image<>text relations and perhaps a bolder move into the track-changes and re-purposing of text.
C. "For writers" -- this is the area where I think we have the most to contribute in terms of bringing something completely new into the fray. All the tools available now simply don't do the job -- either dedicated "project" tools and/or book writing and "brain storming" or "outlining" tools are all thinking about it the wrong way, I feel. We'll have something interesting to say here too in 2006.

Posted to RedleX (Yahoo Groups) 12/5/2005

Here are some of my past blog entries referring to Mellel:
- It's Official: No Right-to-Left Text in Mac Word 12 (and Why I've Dumped Word for Mellel) [11/18/2005]
- Mellel 2.0 Released [11/14/2005]
- The Myth of Limited Software Choice for the Mac [9/17/2005]

Mellel website: http://www.redlers.com