A writer friend asked me if I could recommend an alternative to Microsoft Word. He’s a Mac user, so I asked him if he’d considered TextEdit, the free word-processing application that comes with the Mac. He hadn’t, so we looked at it. “Has it got word-count?” he asked. We checked, and it doesn’t.

But a few seconds Googling found a neat — and free — little app which watches the current TextEdit window and displays an updated word count as you type. You can download it from here.