WordSmith Word Processor Out of Beta

Posted By: Ed Thursday, January 4, 2001 9:04:22 AM

After a couple of weeks of public beta, Blue Nomad has released WordSmith 1.0. This word processor is the first on the Palm platform to support basic text formatting like as bold, italics, underline plus paragraph formatting, justification, and font selection. It has built-in support for the Stowaway folding keyboard and includes a conduit for syncing files with MS Windows. It is available now for $30. At the end of this month the price will jump up to $40. A 200 use trial version is available, too.

WordSmith is able to add text formatting by breaking away from the standard Palm DOC format. It can still read and create DOC files but once text formatting is added to a document, it can no longer be saved as a DOC file.

This is a direction that at least one other company is going, too. The next version of Quickword will also offer text formatting by creating its own file format, which will almost certainly be incompatible with WordSmith's. Expect these two companies to compete for the title of "Best Palm Word Processor" for years to come.

PDAGeek reviewer Mark Thomas wrote an extensive review of the beta. He said, "WordSmith is probably the best document editor that I have seen that can synchronize all the changes--including such extensive formatting--back to your desktop."

WordSmith has extensive support for MS Word for Windows and is compatible with any word processor capable of reading and writing "RTF" files. For Linux and Macintosh users, WordSmith includes a command-line converter and separate document converter application, respectively.

WordSmith is co-developed by Blue Nomad, formerly known as BackupBuddy Software, and Quik Sense Software, makers of the financial application Quik Budget.

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What about MegaDoc?

I.M. Anonymous @ 1/4/2001 10:31:28 AM #
As I recall, there was an attempt at a word processor by Megasoft <http://www.megasoft2000.com/> called MegaDoc. It was an ambitious, but crash-prone and very slow.

Kudoes to BlueNomad on a fantastic app, but they weren't first.

RE: What about MegaDoc?
I.M. Anonymous @ 1/4/2001 11:16:03 AM #
You are right. MegaDoc was a VERY valiant effort, but it was extremely bug ridden and crashed more than it worked. I found myself often uninstalling and reinstalling the app. on my Palm only to find it was corrupted again. On top of that, formatting did not convert very effectively back into Word making editing nearly fruitless.

WordSmith is the first I have seen to make it REALLY WORK and for that I give them enormous kudos! Congratulations, WordSmith - MegaDoc, lets see what you can do to top it!

Docs to Go Pro

Edward Doan @ 1/6/2001 3:34:43 AM #
How does WordSmith compare to DocsToGo Pro 3.0? From what I've gathered DocsToGo Pro has the ability to edit directly to MS Word .DOC files.

Quickword

Mr. T @ 1/6/2001 3:29:02 PM #
Hey, does anyone know how Wordsmith compares to Quickword?
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