What is Taste?

Every once in a while, a new product delivers such exceptional value that it merits special mention. Taste is such a product. It's a word processor, drawing package, and database manager all rolled into a single package that's street-priced at less than $100.

Beyond the Basics

Taste's primary focus is word processing. It's a midrange package that Falls into roughly the same category as the more expensive MacWrite II and Write Now, yet its talents exceed those of both competing packages. Taste provides auto-hyphenation, foot notes, stationary documents, column layouts, odd/even/headers/footers, kerning, a spelling checker, and a thesaurus, all of which take it well beyond what you expect from a low-cost word processor. Taste also lets you open multiple documents or multiple windows within a single documerit simultaneously, A capable find-and-replace Function operates on any attribute, including font, style, size. and color.

Although these are all impressive features for such a low-priced package, what's most distinctive about Taste is that its high-end features are so easy to use. This is most apparent in three specific areas: style sheets, graphics, and mail-merge.

Taste's style sheets combine much of Microsoft Word's functionality with MacWrite II's ease of use. There are options for both text styles and paragraph styles. You can define text styles based on combinations of font, size, style, and even color and then apply them to selected text. If you modify the style, your change will be applied to all previously entered text that uses that style.

Taste gives you lots of flexibility for formatting documents with style sheets. For defining paragraph styles, you can use all the ruler settings — including tabs, justification, and line spacing — us well as all text-style settings. Once you've defined a paragraph style, you can specify whether it affects only paragraphs that you've selected or all existing paragraphs defined by the current ruler, This approach leis you modify an entire document in a single step, so you never have to resort to Select All or Copy Ruler commands.

The program imports and exports most popular word-processing formats, using Claris' XTND technology.

Tasteful Drawing

Taste does an outstanding job of handling graphics. The package provides an integrated object-oriented drawing layer, complete with Bezier curves and color gradient fills. What sets Taste’s drawing layer apart, even from those of more expensive word processors such as FullWrite and WordPerfect 2.0, is the way it overlays the document layer transparently. The advantage of this approach is that you have the feeling of unrestricted interaction between text and graphics. Graphics created in the drawing layer are automatically inserted in the underlying document layer, which is visible at all times. With FullWrite and WordPerfect, you must create and edit graphics in a separate window.

Taste's special graphics effects include text wrap around the contours of a graphic as well as within graphic borders. You can even attach graphics to paragraphs so they How with the paragraph as you edit the document. And since text can be entered into graphics frames, you can combine the frames with columns to create complex page-layout designs.

The third of Taste's impressive fealures is its mail-merge capability. The program includes a basic but effective built-in address-book database. You can't add or delete fields or change their size (you can rename fields, however), and you can do only simple sorts. But for setting up mail-merges, it's far simpler and more llexible to work with Taste's address book than to work with tab-delimited files exported from a database application or created by a word processor.

It’s extremely easy to manage the actual merge operations, You enter the merge fields, complete with delimiters, into documents with just a click of the mouse. This simplicity is combined with powerful selection functions. Selections can be based on field and record criteria. An additional option allows merges from multiple records to print on the same page, which provides a convenient method for making sets of labels or a phone list. Special stationery documents included with Taste make use of this label-making feature.

As a bonus, Taste links with DeltaPoint's graphing package, DeltaGraph, to create charts from tab-delimited data in Taste documents. DeltaGraph reads the data, creates the chart, and automatically pastes it into the current Taste document. Taste includes all the commands necessary to accomplish this task.

While the original version of Taste was plagued by agonizingly slow screen updates, particularly when graphics were involved, the performance of the new version is vastly improved. We found it quite adequate, even on a Macintosh SE. The program remains a bit sluggish tor some operations, however, and its overall performance is still not on a par with that of MacWrite II.

Version 1.0 also suffered from bugs too numerous to mention. Many of them have been fixed with the new version, but enough remain to mar an otherwise outstanding program. One of the most annoying occurs when you're entering text within an existing paragraph. The word wrap sometimes works incorrectly, causing an apparent loss of text. You can usually correct this problem by scrolling to refresh the screen. Still, this problem and others like it can begin to erode your confidence in the reliability of an otherwise outstanding program.

The Bottom Line

Despite its breadth of features. Taste won't suit your needs if you require advanced word-processing functionality such as outlining, table-of-contents generation, indexing, or specia1 table-making features.

Nevertheless, Taste is a superior midrange word processor that delivers the honus of a quite serviceable drawing program, a database manager, and page-layout tools. These functions, teamed with Taste's impressive style-definition features, make Taste a better value than the more expensive MacWrite II and WriteNow packages. And most important of all, Taste superbly balances sophisticated features with exceptional ease of use.

Landau, Ted. (July 1991). Taste. MacUser. (pgs. 70, 72).

Download Taste for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II