I’ve had the chance to use it a bit, and so far I like it. It reminds me a little of my all-time favorite word processor, MacWrite Pro, which never got updated for OS X, in that it’s a word processor with an extra bit of page-layout functionality. Not a lot–it’s not designed to compete with Quark or InDesign–but just enough to make it easy to do two-columns with a one-column header or figure without botching it up like Word.
My biggest quibble so far is that it turns on hyphenation by default. Yuck.
I guess the other knock on it is the media browser. Images are tied to the iPhoto library, which doesn’t help me because most of my writing takes figures which are not in file formats supported by iPhoto, like EPS or TIFF or PICT.
But otherwise, well, looks like things are going to be tough for Mariner. Mariner does have some advantages, like more advanced search-and-replace built-ins (e.g., zapping linefeeds) but I can get a lot of that off various Services now. Plus I won’t have to put up with all of Mariner’s drawing garbage when viewing at odd zooms like 110%.
(original date: 2005.02.28)