Here is a screen shot of MaxTADS (GIF image, 8K).
It is running Kevin "Whizzard" Wilson's short text game The Underoos
That Ate New York.
(also freeware, but not distributed by me.) Note the scroll bar,
full-justified text, italics, boldface,
and full mouse and keyboard text editing.
Color is also supported, although not visible in this screen shot.
The interface is a Mac interface. No surprises. (Well, maybe a couple.) The documentation is all available on-line, under the Help (Balloon) menu. The important feature is that MaxTADS can build a stand-alone Macintosh executable from a TADS game file. (And the stand-alone program can unbuild itself into the TADS file and the original MaxTADS.)
Note that this is explicitly intended to be used by game authors to distribute Mac versions of their games. To this end, I declare that any stand-alone game that you make from your own TADS game file is entirely yours; you may give it away, sell it, or do anything else you like. The only restriction is that you may not interfere with the user's right or ability to build the original, freeware MaxTADS (which will not contain your TADS file.)
The TADS engine in MaxTADS is based on TADS 2.5.4 by Mike Roberts.
You can download the Mac executable. It's a BinHexed file, about 436K. The source is available separately; if you feel like hacking around with it, you can download the source code (667K.) But if you only want to play games, you just want the executable.
If you like the MaxTADS interface, you may also be interested in MaxZip, a similar interpreter I wrote for playing Z-code game files on the Mac. There's also XZip, a Z-code interpreter I wrote for X Windows on any Unix machine (including Linux).
Here is the directory of TADS games in the IF Archive.
I myself have written several text adventures, although they're Z-code games, not TADS. People seem to think that some of them are pretty good.