jarte

Take a great word processor with you with Jarte Portable

What's bigger and more capable than Notepad but not a match for Word? It's WordPad, the basic word processor included with Windows 95 and every Windows release since. Carolina Road's Jarte is a free word processor built upon WordPad. It moves the bar much closer to the capabilities offered by full-featured word processors such as Word, though Jarte is no Word clone. Word can open documents created by Jarte, and Jarte can open many (but not all) Word documents. We tried Jarte Portable, a fully portable version of this free word processor. Like the installed version of … Read more

Featured Freeware: Jarte

The first thing users of this freeware WordPad/Notepad replacement will notice is the unusual interface. Jarte actually uses a simple layout, with a default brushed-metal skin and mouse-over icons that reveal standard Menu bar drop-down menus, but this isn't your basic 1990s user interface. Just the mere fact of having something different to look at is appealing, and generally, it works well. The icons are a bit small, and there's a fair bit of empty space around them so they look somewhat bereft of context.

It turns out Jarte has two other interface schemes. One is an … Read more

Jarte injects form and function to WordPad

It's hard not to be a big fan of Notepad alternatives. Just a little extra effort brings some exceptionally useful tools to that utility, and what NoteTab Light and others do for Notepad, freeware Jarte does for WordPad.

Pronounced "JAR-tay", the first thing users will notice about it is the unusual interface. I liked it, although if I go the rest of my life without seeing a brushed-metal skin again, I'd somehow manage to live. Otherwise, it's a simple layout, and perhaps too minimalist for some. Where the Toolbar and Menubar would usually live, there'… Read more

Power Downloader's strange software solution

Power Downloader has been around long enough to know that young people tend to go through phases in their lives. Particularly in college, when young people are trying to figure out what path they want to take and what kind of individual they want to be, a certain degree of experimentation is expected. When Power's niece, Kitty Kilobyte, recently stated in an e-mail that she would no longer use any software from a huge corporation, Power smiled knowingly to himself and continued to read on. Kitty said one of the programs she needed was a full-featured word processor for her next year at school, but it had to be unique like she is--a program unlike what everybody uses at school.

In Power Downloader's many trips through the Download.com software library, he's found plenty of unique software apps; from the strange and wonderful to the just plain weird. But it wasn't enough to just grab the weirdest word processor available for Kitty; he had to find one that was both unique and useful.… Read more