Taste (software)

Taste is a Macintosh word processor that combined a number of basic features from page layout software, just a "taste" of it, to build a unique solution to preparing documents. Taste was originally offered by DeltaPoint, the publishers of the famed MindWrite, but was eventually spun off to a 3rd party before finally disappearing. Taste works with Mac OS 9, but not Mac OS X, and has not been available for purchase for several years. In many ways Apple's recent Pages application shares the basic "idea" of Taste, combining word processing with page layout.

Like a word processor, Taste allowed the user to simply start typing and continue doing so until they were finished. There was no need, as in a typical page layout program, to create a box to hold the text, or manually add pages or link columns as the document grew. Like a page layout program, Taste also allowed the user to add these boxes if needed, as well as adjust the distance between characters (kerning) or between lines in a paragraph. Fairly complex graphics can be created within this program.

Oddly Taste also lacks a number of features of MindWrite, although it appears to have been written by an entirely different programming team. For instance, Taste does not have a built-in outliner, the "killer feature" of MindWrite which made it a favorite for many years. Nor does Taste include features like sorting or list generation.

Taste is generally considered very complex. As a result it is sometimes said to be temperamental, and users who make complex documents and edit them in major ways have learned to keep good backup files. Sometimes documents become corrupted and it becomes difficult or impossible to recover the data.

ee also

*List of word processors