Year: 2004

Happy New Year to all of our users, partners, and friends around the world. For any of you effected by the tsunami, our thoughts and prayers are with you.

In case you missed it, 2.1.1 is out. Get a complete list of changes here. This release is intended to fix some crashes a number of users were experiencing. Because it is important to us to get crashing bugs fixed as quickly as possible, we did not include fixes for every issue people have reported to us. We have another bigger release planned for a few months from now that will include these fixes.

Well, 2.1.1 is just about ready to go out the door. It turns out that when we released 2.1 is contained a timing bug that none of our beta testers (or us) caught, but many of our other users did, unfortunately. It has taken us some time to trace down this problem but we got it. This fix and a few other little things will be in the 2.1.1 release.

On another note, we are gearing up to go to MacWorld this January. We will have a small booth again this year, but we plan to have something to give away so come by our booth and check it out. I don’t know the number yet, but I will post it when I find out.

We are also starting work on our next release. Our next release should come out the first part of next year and will have some new features. I’m pretty excited about it because I think that will be the point where we will officially have a pretty good “general” word processor that we can then use to start adding lots more features targeted at specific users.

We are working on yet another update to 2.1. This one will include a number of additional bug fixes and speed improvements. Hopefully this will be the last “fixer” update; there are a number of UI enhancements I am really itching to put into place.

Phillipe has posted a French version of the Nisus Writer Express 2.1 release notes. Also, there is a French mailing list for Nisus Writer.

Voila: le version français de le info de Nisus Writer Express 2.1. Nous remercions Philippe. Aussi, il y a une liste de diffusion francophone consacrée à Nisus Writer.

Une nouvelle version est disponible avec le nombre de version correct. Téléchargez le demo.

Il y a un erreur dans cette version de Nisus. Il indique que la version est “2.1 beta 1” mais cette version est 2.1 finale. Une nouvelle version sera disponible bientôt. Merci de votre compréhension (et pour mon mauvais français).

MacGeneration was the first to cover our French localization. A highlight: “With this French localizations, French-speaking users can finally envision putting Word in the cupboard.” (My own translation/paraphrase).

Phillippe mentioned the release on his blog of course.

Get it here:

http://www.nisus.com/free/express.php

Well, we are ready to release 2.1. Unfortunately a flu epidemic hit our office and kept enough people out of the office we simply could not release today! Hopefully we can put it out tomorrow or Thursday.

The latest issue of About This Particular Macintosh has a very fair review of Nisus Writer Express. I am thrilled that the author mentioned the “tags” feature. It is a feature that is almost never mentioned in reviews, though it is very powerful and useful.

Just for that mention, and the very nice words about tables, I will link to his blog.

There is also a nice review in the Washington Post (thanks Mary for the link!).

In preparation for the new French localization of Nisus Writer Express, I thought I would point out Le blog de NisusWriter, which is a blog all about writing in French using Nisus (it is itself in French).

I hope Phillippe gets a lot more traffic when NWE2.1 comes out.

We are putting the final touches on the next release now. It will be called Nisus Writer Express 2.1. It has lots of speed improvements, many little changes you will probably never notice (unless it bothered you) and French localization!

Ah, guess it had to happen sooner or later: we’ve been hit by a rash of blog spam. I’ve gone ahead and deleted all the current spam, but manually removing posts is not an effective long term solution. So, we’ve had to change our policies here a bit.

I’d like for us to keep allowing unregistered users to post comments, so that hasn’t changed (yet). Instead we’ve added some moderation rules that hopefully will target the spammers. We’ll see how it plays out. In the meantime, if your comment does not show up immediately, please be patient with us.

A number of users have wondered how “Styles” (as contrasted with “styles” and other attributes such as fonts) interact in a Nisus Writer Express document. They also don’t understand how the Tags on the Statusbar can help them.

The various Tags of the Statusbar appear when your selected text has the attributes applied.

Believe it or not, text can have no attributes applied. Such text displays in 12-point Helvetica.

Each tag on the Statusbar controls a different kind of grouped attributes.

Paragraph Style
Character Style
ruler (indents, tabs, alignment, line spacing)
font (font family, typeface, size, variants)
color
highlight

The way a character is displayed is the result of a merging of all the attributes applied.

You can see which attributes are present by looking at the tags on the Statusbar.

Tags override each other moving from right to left.

In other words…
To figure out how some text will display:

1. Take 12-pt Helvetica.
2. Apply to it any Paragraph Style attributes using the Styles palette (which may overide the font).
3. Apply to that a Character Style using the Styles palette.
4. Then apply (i.e. modify) the ruler.
5. Then change the font/size and/or style stuff (i.e. using the Character palette method, not the Styles palette method).
6. Then modify the color.
7. Finally add a little highlighter.

Note that Paragraph and Character Style tags are always visible, they may just be faded if no Style is applied.

I forgot to mention, a user tells us that we were reviewed in a German mag called MacLife. They gave us 5 stars out of 6. Pros: flexible user interface, good macro functionality, language sensitive spell checking. Cons: weak Word import (especially concerning tables and styles). The review is not online right now, but I will link to it when it comes available, I hope! Thanks Andreas for the tip off!

This will go up on our front page soon, but I thought I would mention it here too: MacUser UK printed their review of Nisus Writer Express 2.0 in this months issue (go buy it if you are in the UK…it is really a good Mac mag). 5 mice. Cool huh?

By the way, thanks to everyone for all the great input you have been posting on the comments here about features that you need and such. Your input really means a lot! I hope to have more commentary on this in the future.

Typing speed is now even better. We eliminated a few extra time wasters to keep it responsive even in very large documents. Also, we are changing how we do some thing in the background so they will not interfere with your typing. In general I can anywhere type inside a 300+ page document and Express keeps up with me. It actually does an OK job of this in general in 2.0, but we are smoothing out some rough spots that gave some people trouble sometimes.

One other change we are going to make for our Draft View-using friends: we will no long layout the page view of the document until you actually switch to it in Express. What this means is that if you open a file in Draft View, it will open much faster, but you might have to wait for a few seconds the first time to switch to Page View mode so we can do the initial typesetting. We will put up a progress indicator, of course, so you know what is happening.

Up until now, we have focused on adding “basic” word processing features and a few of the features that were unique to Nisus Writer Classic. We have added them mostly in the order of popularity: the more commonly requested features get added first. In the coming year, our strategy for adding features is going to change somewhat. Now that we have most of the basics in place for our product, we are going to focus on targeting specific niches.

We are still in the process of making a final decisions about what those niches will be, but once we decide we will be sure to let everyone know. I can say that we consider Nisus Writer to be a product family of which Nisus Writer Express is the first member.

Lowendmac had some good things to say about us:

The best word processor on the Mac, bar none. …Nisus is a great word processor, and now that it has footnote and endnote capabilities again, it’s the pick of the crop.