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WordSmith Parts I-IV

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Originally published in four parts from May 15, 2001 through June 5, 2001

Part I: Overview

WordSmith is a fairly new application from BlueNomad (formerly BackupBuddy). It serves four main functions:

1. MemoPad replacement
2. Doc Reader
3. Conduit for MSWord documents
4. MSWord document editor

Most people focus on the Microsoft Word integration aspects of WordSmith, and for people who use a lot of Word documents and want them available on their Palm or for people who want to write formatted documents on their Palm that easily translates to the desktop, WordSmith provides an easy solution. There are ways that the integration could be improved, but WordSmith does a better job than the other Palm products that supports Microsoft Word synchronization.

I don't use a lot of Microsoft Word documents so although I was interested in this functionalilty, it wasn't foremost in my mind. I do get sent a Word file every so often at work, and it would be nice to carry them on my Palm as needed. I am also asked to write an infrequent requirements document or other similar document in Word. The ability to do this on my Palm without having to add a lot of formatting later is definitely appealing.

I may not use Word much, but I do use MemoPad quite a lot. I write most of my reviews on my Palm, write other articles, take notes at meetings, and sometimes even write source code on my Palm. I am not terribly interested in formatted memos because most of the time I am writing some type of source document, be it source code or html for an article. No one is going to be looking at how pretty these files look. However, I have over 1.1MB of data in my MemoDB and I am certainly open to any application that can make the memo-writing process easier.

I love my Doc reader (cspotrun) and I doubt that WordSmith could make me give it up, but an all-in-one application would be nice and I definitely think including a Doc reader in WordSmith was a good idea. I could see using the Doc reader capabilities of WordSmith to quickly refer to reference documentation while writing memos. If I need to look up an HTML tag or a PocketC function right now, I have to leave MemoPad, go to cspotrun, select the document I want, find the specific information I need, then go back to MemoDB. Being able to quickly look something up in a Doc file within my memo application would definitely be a time saver.

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