My benchmark “gold standard,” so to speak, of text-crunching applications is Tom Bender’s superb, Apple-Scriptable, $15 shareware-styled text editor and text cleaner Tex Edit Plus. Thanks to its support of text formatting, it can also serve admirably as a lightweight word processor, filling the gap between pure plain text editors and full-featured word processors. TE+ is lean and quick, with the best AppleScript support of any application I’ve ever used.

Using Nisus’ own description, the Nisus Writer Pro word processor for Mac OS X is much like the Macintosh itself: “fast, clean, and with all the power you need.” And with today’s announcement of Nisus Writer Pro 2, it’s more functional than ever. This new version adds a suite of drawing tools, watermarks, paragraph-level borders and shading, EPUB export, a customizable “special characters” menu and palette, and saved PDF files create clickable links for cross-references, page numbers in generated TOCs/Indexes, and hyperlinks.

These days, TextEdit is actually an amazingly powerful and capable mini word processor, and there’s no question that one could easily desktop publish a quite professional-looking newsletter with it, although it wouldn’t be my first recommendation for that purpose. TextEdit now supports some pretty advanced near page-layout functions, such as text kerning, ligatures, baseline adjustments, and style copying and pasting. If you aren’t familiar with those terms, you will more than likely never miss the capabilities they refer to, but if you have use for them, they are there, and you don’t have to pay a cent extra to get them.

Having trouble getting further than, “It was a dark and stormy night?” Same here, mostly. Motivation and focus are my two biggest obstacles when it comes to completing writing projects. It’s quite easy for me to get started on a new novel or play, much more difficult to actually complete one. But there are programs out there to help, and in this column I’m going to pull together and detail many of these Mac and iPhone apps and resources.