Mellel for iPad
A word workhorse in iOS form
£19.99 FROM RedleX, mellel.com needs iOS 8.1 or later
Mellel is loved in academic and technical writing circles. It excels in the crucial tasks of structuring documents, creating indexes and tracking citations – things that Microsoft Word
hasn’t been very good at. It’s very fast and very stable, and while it takes a bit of getting used to, it’s an excellent workhorse if you write text-heavy documents for a living.
While Mellel has been available on the Mac for years, the iPad edition is relatively new. It’s been designed to work in conjunction with the desktop app and clearly expects you do to the bulk of your work on that. So, for example, while you can easily apply styles, you can’t currently create new ones. Similarly, you can edit the content of text boxes, but you can’t add them to documents inside the iPad version. We like that indexing updates as you go, but then it’s disappointing that the table of contents doesn’t follow suit.
The interface is clean and generally well thought out, but there is one incredibly annoying interface decision that we initially thought was a bug. Normally when you select a word in an iOS app, you can then expand your selection by moving the selection handles. Similarly, when you want to resize an object, you select it and then tap and drag the resizing dots on its edge or corner. With Mellel, however, those behaviours don’t work. To select more than one word you have to press and hold your finger down before the selection handles become movable; to resize an image you need to long-press on the resize points. It’s really not a user-friendly approach.
Export limitation
The other problem is that the iPad version reads Word file formats but doesn’t export them. Like it or loathe it, Word is the default in many businesses and many writing jobs. We’ve just completed several large book projects and a lot of corporate copywriting, and in every single case Word wasn’t just preferred, it was demanded. In many cases that’s because the client or internal readers use the commenting and change-tracking features; while Mellel on iPad has those features, lack of Word export means they’re only available to other Mellel users. The developers clearly assume that you’ll be submitting your work from the desktop app.
If you’re already a Mellel user on your Mac then the iPad edition is a useful companion. As a standalone word processor, however, we feel that it’s too limited to appeal to most.