Points to Ponder

There’s an inter­est­ing short art­icle on Low-End Mac about how the author uses an Apple Lisa for his writ­ing tasks. He cites the fact that he can turn it off and resume exactly where he was by turn­ing it back on, not hav­ing to worry about either sav­ing doc­u­ments or power out­ages. More import­antly he reminds us to con­sider whether all the bells and whistles of the latest greatest pro­ductiv­ity appas are things we actu­ally use. I blogged earlier on this point and was com­par­ing Word 1.0 on the Mac to the cur­rent incarn­a­tion. Without being some neo-Luddite and pre­tend­ing like the older tech­no­logy is that far super­ior, I think that there are points to be made for simple and fast.

Non­ethe­less, its not quite that black and white. I have tried to find an altern­at­ive word pro­cessor for use under Win­dows with less bag­gage than Word. I have been unsuc­cess­ful. Both Abi­Word and Open­Of­fice seem as bloated and frankly try to emu­late Word at the expense of actu­ally think­ing about how the human actual pro­cesses words. Admit­tedly there are a few chal­lengers of note on OSX. But, what about start­ing with TextEdit or the like and simply being able to mod­u­larly add fea­tures as desired.

One of the other points raised relates to the concept that some tasks haven’t been improved upon by faster pro­cessors and the like. Word pro­cessing can get away with the older 68K…frankly given the choice, I would actu­ally be very happy doing my word pro­cessing on one of the NeXT boxes and WriteNow. That was (and still is) speed with an awe­somely crisp dis­play. Pure mono­chrome (I have little need for col­our when word pro­cessing) and a joy to the eyes. strangely far less eye candy than OSX has become bloated with. A pur­pose built word pro­cessing engine. I should crank up the old NeXT laser printer and see if it still works as well.

As to the age of the machine we use…think about that for a sec — a twenty four year old com­puter. And its not the old­est work­ing ones about…alas, it seems like just yesterday.

Update: The pon­der­ing is usu­ally good enough to get me explor­ing. In this case I happened upon PolyEdit from Rus­sian pub­lisher Poly­Soft. They have a tiny 1.3Mb word pro­cessor that reads and writes .docs and seems to have a rather robust fea­ture set, yet runs like a wee demon. I’ll post com­ments if my trial goes well. So far so good.

Fur­ther Update: Well, if I didn’t need foot­notes or end­notes I’d be doing well, unfor­tu­nately PolyEdit has neither. Addi­tion­ally, while it will import Word 2000/XP/2003 ver­sions, it will only save as Word v6. Pity. Its super fast and does offer a wide vari­ety of fea­tures and the inter­face really works.