WordSmith Parts I-IV

bolded word formatted in WordSmith it retains the formatting of the later text. If I delete the same thing from a word formatted by my using <b> and </b> tags, the end tag is deleted and the rest of the document is bold. I can no longer edit my document seemlessly in WordSmith. There is no visual cue, so I need to know which formatting I used when I originally created the document. That's a lot to expect of a user.

There are several things about the WordSmith memo mode I do like. I very much like the menus that pop up when you tap on the number of a memo in the memo list view. Deleting a memo in MemoPad can be as much as a four tap process, but in Wordsmith it can be done in two taps.

There is also an option to save a memo as a word file. To be honest from the way the menu item was labelled, I expected it to convert my memo into a Palm Doc file and not a Microsoft Word file. It converted it to the WordSmith view of a Word file. This is still a nice feature, although I'd personally prefer an auto-convert to Doc format. To me, that feature would be worth the cost of admission.

However, the excessive sluggishness of any step that requires file manipulation (launching the application, closing an edited menu, opening an existing memo for editing, letter filtering the list of memos, etc) makes WordSmith very difficult to use. Granted, I have more memos than the average user, but I also have more memos in MemoPad which isn't the least bit sluggish. I also hate being tied to one proprietary tool for something as fundamental as my memos, and by using a proprietary markup language rather than HTML or something else other applications might understand, WordSmith effectively turns any memos with formatting into a proprietary document. That bothered me quite a bit. Although there are seeds of potential, I am afraid I cannot recommend using WordSmith as a MemoPad replacement.

Part III: Doc Reader

As I mentioned in the overview article, it would be nice to have an all-in-one application that lets you refer to reference material related to what you are writing about. I think the idea of a Doc reader integrated into a text editor and word processor is dead on.

Unfortunately, the WordSmith reader doesn't meet my

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