Atlantis Ocean Mind 1.5 Review 80 Percent of Word's Power for 12 Percent of Its Price Eric Grevstad
Mon 6/9/03 -- Oh, kindly gift, oh, generous boon: Two weeks ago, as part of a price cut for the Office XP suite, Microsoft lowered the retail cost of Word 2002 from $339 to $299. It's a nice gesture, but in truth nobody buys the hyper-dominant word processor at retail. They get it as part of the Office suite, usually preinstalled on a PC.
And nobody uses all the features of Word, either. To be sure, certain users at certain times need things like math equation editing, footnotes, version tracking, and a built-in mini spreadsheet. But if we're honest, the vast majority of us would admit that Microsoft Word is bloated overkill for our everyday letter-, report-, and memo-writing, and too complex to be called friendly or intuitive.
There are excellent alternatives that match Word feature for feature -- Corel WordPerfect 11 and the free OpenOffice.org -- but they, too, are more than you need for routine writing and editing. There's Windows' own WordPad, but that "lite" word processor goes too far in the other direction, lacking features like a spell checker and justified text.
Doesn't anybody make a quick, compact, capable word processor that fits between bare-bones text editors and deluxe desktop publishers anymore? Happily, yes: a shareware company called Rising Sun Solutions has just released a major upgrade to its program, which bears the hippie name of Atlantis Ocean Mind. Even happier, the 2.5MB download costs a lot less than $299: After the 30-day trial, you can register and get access to Atlantis updates for $35.
Nothing Fancy, But Classy
We reviewed Atlantis in October 2001, but last month's release 1.5 is the sixth upgrade since then (with a steady stream of minor updates and bug fixes in between; version 1.5 has already ratcheted up to 1.5.0.2).
As far as the features Atlantis has, it's frankly easier to specify what it hasn't: While you'll find font- and page-formatting and layout options galore, the program does not offer tables, footnotes or endnotes, a thesaurus, or a grammar checker.
Nor is it suited for any but the simplest desktop publishing, since Atlantis can't wrap text around graphics -- images are treated as inserted characters. You can resize an image (specifying either its print size or a percentage of its original dimensions), but placement is pretty much limited to centering it on its own line between text paragraphs, and neither images nor headlines can be dressed up with borders or drop shadows.
Atlantis does, however, let you format all or just selected sections of a document with multiple columns, with vertical lines between columns if you like, and customize text with not only font, size, and color choices (and more than a dozen kinds of underlining), but precise control over compression or expansion, intercharacter spacing, and kerning. And, in a bit of nifty simplicity for anyone who's ever muddled through manually editing style sheets and templates like Word's NORMAL.DOT -- though Atlantis has those, too -- dialog boxes for page, font, and paragraph formatting include a one-click button to make your choices the default for future documents.
