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Applelinks reader William Baltyn has forwarded this excellent review of the new, OS X only, word processor, Okito Composer. CM.

Okito Composer is a word processor designed for OS X, currently at v0.3d1 and is early in its release history. Consequently, bugs are common to this release, and, indeed, expected at this stage of development.

Rather than concentrate on the bugs, which the author, Charles Jolley, fully acknowledges and appears to have in hand, I shall concentrate on the concept behind the application and potential improvements which I can suggest.

Composer has been written specifically for OS X and so is able to take advantage of the user interface 'widgets' which OS X has made its own. First and foremost, there is no floating toolbar. Personally, I can't stand them; appearing when the application is at the front, magically disappearing when you accidentally click on something outside. For me, they are irritating and remind me all too much of the Single Document Interface used in Windows applications.

Having said that, if you want them, you can get them. The best use of OS X widgetry is the appearance of a tooldrawer to the right of each window, similar to the mailbox drawer which appears to the side of the main window in Mail. The tooldrawer covers page size, font and paragraph settings, a find dialogue as well as basic statistics for the current document. The different sections can be re-ordered, hidden by a Finder-like 'flippy' or can be dragged outside the toolbar to become a floating palette.

Since most of the functionality is contained in the tooldrawer, the button bar, which appears at the top of each window, is basic (and easily hidden by the button in the top right when not needed), consisting of a page layout pull-down menu and 9 buttons. Three of these buttons, covering font colour and toggles for the ruler and toolbar, are, in my opinion, unnecessary. The font colour should be contained under the 'character' palette in the tooldrawer and the other two options are unlikely to be changed on a regular basis and so should be relegated to menu commands.

The button bar is missing a couple of useful commands; inserting files (e.g. graphics) and inserting tables would be two useful buttons to add. Having said that, tables are not yet supported in Composer but would be a welcome addition.

On the UI front, Okito Composer has a clean and uncluttered appearance, which is a pleasure to work with and allows easy selection of key options and features, even for the novice user.

The application uses RTF for plain text and OS X standard RTFD for files with graphics and so reading files using other applications poses no problem. There are no import or export options at present and it does not yet support stationery or templates.

In summary, when compared to the OS 9/OS X hybrid behaviour of Appleworks 6, this application is a real breath of fresh air, both from the UI point of view and its use of open standards. I have no idea what the implementation of MS Word Vx is like, and frankly have no desire to find out. The point is, nonetheless, that Okito Composer has embraced the OS X way of doing things and very much to its credit. The author's release of the software to the public to receive feedback, especially at this early stage, is a brave move.

Presumably, Composer will eventually be a shareware or commercial product. In the meantime, it is free to trial. I would suggest that anyone looking for an innovative word-processing solution should download it from http://www.okito.net and get that feedback to the author so it can become a flag-bearer for OS X.

William Baltyn

http://homepage.mac.com/einekleine/
http://www.baltyn.com/

Thanks. CM

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