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As your child grows up, OK-Writer will grow with them. OK-Writer provides additional features tucked in the menu bar where they won't confuse younger children, but are available as your child matures.
OK-Writer provides easy access to common fonts, styles, and colors. Each button has a fun sound effect to engage the imagination of your child.
However, OK-Writer still offers all the standard features expected in a basic word processor, including a spell checker, complete access to font and style settings, the ability to insert graphics into stories, and much more. These options are all available through the pull-down menus, and are available when your child is ready to use them.
OK-Writer also features "Speak As You Type," a fun and educational feature that you can enable in the preferences. With this feature, OK-Writer can receite aloud the keys, words, and sentences as your child types them (in any combination). This can help new readers learn words, and can be of value to visually impaired students as well.
New in version 1.3:
Typing the letter "a" with letter-by-letter speech enabled no longer says "aye" on Leopard when using the new Alex voice. Also, you can now set the default font in the preferences, and there's a new preference that lets you disable the "Start Over" button to help keep small kids out of trouble. In addition, you can now configure the default folder to save stories into.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.3 or later for PowerPC systems,
Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later for Intel systems
OK-Writer was designed from the ground up for Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" or later. OK-Writer is also a Universal Binary, running natively on both PowerPC and Intel based Macintosh computers.
System support:
PPC/Intel
$10.00 Shareware. This license lets you install the software on every Macintosh in your home. Schools may buy a site license that allows OK-Writer to be installed on every Macintosh on a single campus, including school-owned laptops that go home with teachers or students. The site license costs $150. OK-Writer doesn't have reminder notices to remind you to pay; we don't feel that it's appropriate to confuse children with nagging messages. Instead, we count on the honesty of parents and teachers to pay for the product if they choose to keep the software for more than a 10-day trial period.
OK-Writer is available for purchase either as a download or on CD-ROM.
For more information, visit:
http://www.syndicomm.com/mac/ok-writer/
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This product not only looks adequate for a
children’s word processor, the feature set
and big button access would be kind to an
elderly population new to computer use.
Since it does not pretend to cater to a group
such as TexEdit or Text Wrangler, these
other choices may be overlooked by those
persons seeking a children-friendly app.
But the easily found large button interface
which reminds me of telephones for the
elderly, could encourage persons not
wanting to read from drop-down menus
in order to make a word processor work.
The interface is not too play-toy like. I’d
recommend this app to elderly new Mac
users who may want its alias on the desk
if not predominately among items in Dock.
Of course, in Leopard 10.5.x, TextEdit is
more of a full featured word processor
than ever; included in the system and it
isn’t really user unfriendly, just unintuitive.
Having a word processor with skill levels
based on a similar scheme as a User’s
access privileges in OSX, & incorporating
a user interface which would adapt to
the User’s age or skill level, could be a
boon to TextEdit; as a native 10.5.x app.
(This suggestion would not surprisingly
upset some third-party app writers.)
And, of course, with public comments,
they are free to use any ideas they’d
care to gather to improve their product!
Happy computing!