14 DAY TRIAL // Is it that place in the past with the people underwater?
No, it's not the lost underwater city, it's Atlantis, the word processor. It seems as though Microsoft Word has recently dominated the word processing market for these past few years with Microsoft Word and other similar packages. You're not going to type anything out in notepad anymore when MS Word has so many options. Atlantis is the new challenger to the throne. Let's see how it does in our word processing review.
I honestly didn't know what to think when I started using this product. I thought that for a complete and accurate review, I'd need to immerse myself completely and even use it for writing my review.
Inside Atlantis
The main interface is split into 2 main parts. Your main window dominates the center and the right part of the screen while the left window pane has some shortcuts that aid your writing. If you don't know the hotkeys, this is a great time saver.
I was taken back when I started using Atlantis. A word processor that included sounds as you interacted with it. In fact, it made so many sounds, I soon didn't know what was happening around me. I can't deny that I enjoyed the sound of the typewriter's keys hitting the smooth surface of the blank paper. It made me feel like a famous writer of olden days. I had a little Hemmingway moment all to myself, but it was soon interrupted by a honk. Woops, my caps lock was accidentally hit.
I went on writing and pretty soon I was snapped out of my enamored daydream by all the commotion. There's a sound for everything. You cut and there's a sound. You paste and there's a sound. You undo and there's a sound. I was soon fed up with all the sound effects.
It felt as though I was completely overwhelmed and lost focus with so many things going on at once. So I decided that the sounds were not to my personal liking. You could also enable and disable which sounds you prefer, but some people need silence.
Atlantis did have some things that I thought were extremely useful. I thought shortcut key for changing lower case to capitals and capitals to lowercase was ingenious! If you do decide to turn your sounds off and you inadvertently start typing out a whole sentence in caps, you can quickly invert them back to lowercase. There's also an 'invert capitals' in a whole sentence (this helps if you've been writing with caps lock on for a long time).
For every font or size change you want to perform, there's an added box that appears to show you the way the font looks and its actual size.
Some hiccups
Atlantis did lack some fundamentality. There were some rough spots that could be smoothed over. I noticed that when I copied a text with hyperlinks in it from a website, it lacked the ability to copy the HTML address correctly. I kept on getting kicked to 'My Documents' instead of the appropriate website.
As I was trying out all the options, I may have bogged Atlantis slightly. I was in the middle of testing out the Auto-correct feature, when all of a sudden, it froze up like a icicle. I guess still needs a little fine tuning.
The Good
It's a good product with lots of good features. There are interactive sounds and a nice mini window pane on the left for quick access to popular shortcuts. I also liked that the interface is entirely customizable.
The Bad
Yes, it's got sounds, but it lacks some functionality. Links don't get transferred correctly when you cut from an outside source. The auto-correct-all tool needs a little work.
The Truth
Well, there's nothing that makes me want to jump off my feet and go out to grab this product. Aside from some small add-ons, there's nothing new. Where's the grammar check? Atlantis needs more features to even think of getting close to Microsoft Word's functionality, practicality and popularity. For a basic word processor, this is a fine processor, but for the professional user, stick with what works best. If you don't want to dish out the cash for the more expensive MS Word, Atlantis word processor will cover most of your basic word processing needs.
Check out some screenshots below.
