SimpleText
 SimpleText under the German version of Mac OS 8 | |
| Developer(s) | Apple Computer, now Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.4
|
| Operating system | System 7.x-Mac OS 9 |
| Type | Text editor |
| License | Proprietary |
SimpleText is the native text editor for the Apple Macintosh OS.[1] SimpleText allows editing including text formatting (underline, italic, bold, etc.), fonts, and sizes. It was developed to integrate the features included in the different versions of TeachText that were created by various software development groups within Apple.[2]
It can be considered similar to Windows' WordPad application. In later versions it also gained additional read only display capabilities for PICT files, as well as other Mac OS built-in formats like Quickdraw GX and QTIF, 3DMF and even QuickTime movies.[2] SimpleText can even record short sound samples and, using Apple's PlainTalk speech system, read out text in English. Users who wanted to add sounds longer than 24 seconds, however, needed to use a separate program to create the sound and then paste the desired sound into the document using ResEdit.[2]
SimpleText evolved from TeachText,[3] which was derived from the Edit (application), a simple text editor distributed with the earliest Macintosh operating systems to demonstrate the use of the Macintosh interface and the TextEdit application programming interface. Both applications were used to open Readme documents, ensuring universal access after Apple stopped bundling MacWrite.
The key improvement between SimpleText and TeachText was the addition of text styling. SimpleText could support multiple fonts and font sizes, while TeachText supported only a single font per document. Adding text styling features made SimpleText WorldScript-savvy, meaning that it can use Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters.[4] Like TeachText, SimpleText was also limited to only 32 kB of text in a document,[2] although images could increase the file size beyond this limit.
In Mac OS X, SimpleText is replaced by the more powerful TextEdit, which reads and writes more document formats. Mac OS X also includes common Unix-like console text editors, such as vim and nano.
Apple has released the source code for a Carbon version of SimpleText in the Panther (10.3) Developer Tools. If the Developer Tools are installed, it can be found at /Developer/Examples/Carbon/SimpleText.
See also
References
- ^ Engst, Tonya (1998). "Writing a ReadMe File? Read This". MacTech. 14 (10). Retrieved 17 February 2013.
- ^ a b c d Stearns, Bryan. "Technical Note TN1005: The Compleat (sic.) Guide to SimpleText". Apple Technical Notes. Archived from the original on 11 October 2004. Retrieved 17 February 2013.
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Dernbach, Christoph (24 May 2008). "Mac OS 7.0". Mac History. Retrieved 16 February 2013.
- ^ "Important Information About System 7.5 and the Chinese Language Kit" (PDF). Apple Inc. 1994. Retrieved 16 February 2013.
External links
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