Month: September 2004

Recently Ori Redler, who makes a competing product compared his product to ours for speed. One of his tests was:

B. Scrolling speed: I’ve tested this by pressing the Page Down button for a minute to see to what page I get and how many key presses are remembered. NWE: got to page 27, remembered to page 53 (took one more minute). Mellel: End of document (after 45 seconds).

Thanks to some hard work by Martin scrolling is now silky smooth. I just tried this test on a 122 page document. NWE took 12 seconds to reach the end, Mellel took 12 seconds also. I think we may be able to speed this up a little more, but I’m pretty happy with our improvement!

So far we have eliminated many of the beachballs that can occur when you apply formatting changes to your text. We have also found some ways to significantly improve scrolling performance. I had not realized how slow NWE has become in this area until we got some speed up. This morning I opened a document using a dev build and I was startled at how fast the scrolling was.

The big items in our next release will be French localization and performance improvements. We are working on four areas in particular: application launch time, file open time, scrolling speed, and beachballs that appear when applying formatting and accessing menus. The last three items are most apparent when working with large documents. I’ve spent the last week (while most of our engineers were on vacation) profiling NWE to find out exactly the cause of the delays people are experiencing. So far nothing too hard to fix; I’m optimistic that the next release will be more speedy.

According to the Columbia Spectator Online an increasing number of college students are buying Macs because of the iPod and because they simply crash less. I certainly know that is the case as PLNU. When I started there, they actually told us that we needed to buy a Dell or else we would not be able to work with the network at school. A number of students I know ended up switching to Macs while they were at school because it turns out that despite having no support from the school, Macs still have fewer problems with the network.

So, now that 2.0 is out, I thought some people might be interested in what we are doing next. Well, first off, we have started advertising! We are running ads on both macminute.com and on As the Apple Turns. We are also going to start ads in a few other places as well. Our theme for 2.0 is Express Yourself and we have a number of really fun promotions planned around that theme. I’m really looking forward to them!

On that note, we will probably hold off on some of those promotions until we get our next release out, which we are working hard on right now. (Well, not really. Half of our engineering team is taking some well earned vacation time right now, but after that, they will be hard at work, I promise!) The next release will come out fairly soon and will include a French localization. It will also have performance improvements. I’ve already seen noticeable improvements in our RTF reader so I’m very hopeful about the progress we will be able to make in a short time.

ultramookie has some nice things to say about how responsive we have been trying to follow up with people who are having trouble with NWE.

We got into some trouble with 1.0 because it was underpowered anyway and our older users were pretty upset at us and posted anywhere they could to complain. It hurt our reputation and our sales tremendously.

This release we are working really hard to stay on top of issues that people raise about NWE. We finally have enough features that we feel like we can stand on this product as a good word processing solution for many users and we want to make sure that those who are having problems know that we really care about them. (Because we do!)

Thanks especially to Dave and Mark who have really worked hard to follow up with everyone who contacts us, good or bad. (And there have been a LOT of people!)

Just a week after releasing 2.0, we are releasing 2.0.1. The primary reason we are doing this is that we received a ton of bug reports about people getting error messages continually when the app started. It turns out that this was due to a conflict that arose when users had some odd combination of accessibility settings set in Mac OS X. No one in the beta test program apparently had these settings, but a number of Mac users do.

The settings are not something you would commonly have turned on; most reporters we talked to, in fact, said they had things set that way by mistake. So I suppose that is why we did not catch it. Still, this tells me we need to improve our practices with our beta program. Continually improving the processes that drive our business is something we have done constantly since I came to Nisus and it is something we will do again, this time with our beta testing.

Now we are turning our attention to speeding up file open times.

Submitted without comment:

Writing in Microsoft Word is an Exercise in Frustration

Hey, don’t yell at me, I didn’t write it.

I think it was last december that I foolishly said it should only take about three months to properly implement footnotes, with endnotes being just a tiny additional effort. I was right, in a way. Knowing what I know now it would take perhaps even less time. I just didn’t forsee the extra months it would take to force the Cocoa text system, basically a black box that wants to just layout an entire document of simple text, to implement the simple algorithm that we wanted. Then, when it seemed done and worked for all of our test documents, a few of our beta testers provided to us test documents that proved truly nightmarish to debug. I’d like to say we got them all. I bet that a few of our users will try things that we never even thought of and it will be back to the debugger again. Just know that we’ll listen to your feedback and any issues that come up will be handled as fast as we can.

Some bloggers are starting to mention NWE. tingilinde says everyone should download NWE2 to try it out and tell us what you think, something I definitely recommend!

Giles Turnbull on O’Reilly is also trying out NWE and will blog more about it in the coming weeks.

It’s out! Nisus Writer Express 2.0 was released very late last night and I have to be honest here: You have no idea how happy we are to see it released. Well, I guess you do now.

Anyway, as Charles mentioned in an earlier post, we worked very hard on this release and I think that it shows, if I do say so myself. The engineering team did most of the heavy lifting, keeping the app stable even in the alpha builds, let alone the beta builds. Our beta test team did a great job in finding bugs, they deserve to be acknowledged too. We couldn’t have done it without them, that’s for sure.

So thanks to all of you for your help, and thanks to our engineering team for making a great app.

Now, time for sleep!

Well, the first review of Express 2.0 is in. Not bad for a product that hasn’t even been released as of this writing.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. Pre-game jitters, so to speak. This is a big release for us, and we have worked very hard to get Express 2.0 right.

The mac360.com review makes me think that we have.