Month: March 2005

In case you have not yet received our latest newsletter (you are a subscriber aren’t you?) we’ve started talking about our next release, which means that we are getting close to finishing it. There are a lot of cool features in this next release that I am really happy to finally deliver, including LinkBack among others.

One very important thing we are going to do is release a public beta. This will give us a chance to work out as many outstanding issues that we can with users before we call this new version final. We are also going to make some changes to our support page that will make it easier to get information about any outstanding issues that we do find and how you can work around them or get a fix. A lot of these changes we are making are due to some great suggestions by users in our forum so thanks for your input everyone!

Several people have asked how Apple feels about LinkBack. We actually talked to several different people at Apple about this last year. They basically felt like LinkBack would be useful and they encouraged us to go for it. Getting Apple to be actively involved in LinkBack, of course, is a whole other matter. The primary place I would like to see Apple support LinkBack is in Keynote. A number of graphics apps are signing on to this, so I think supporting LinkBack could really help make some Keynote user’s lives much easier.

A lot of people have asked me so far when we can expect products to be available with this new technology in them. I can’t tell you for sure, but I know we are planning a new release to be out in the next month or two and the others are planning releases that will be out soon also (perhaps even sooner than Nisus!)

LinkBack has been in the works now for almost a year, so I am very pleased to be able to finally announce it. Of course, the real fun will start once we release some products that support this new technology. If you work with an application that you think could benefit from supporting LinkBack, please let them know and request they support it. The more Mac developers that support LinkBack, the better for all of us Mac users!

In case you haven’t seen the news about it, today we announced a new open source technology in cooperation with The Omni Group and Blacksmith, Inc. called LinkBack. The purpose of LinkBack is to make it easier for you to use several different applications together to create a final report or document. With LinkBack you will be able to create charts or diagrams and then paste them into Nisus Writer documents. Later you can edit those graphics just by double-clicking on them.

Now, this kind of technology is not new. Other technologies have existed for years to do this kind of thing: OLE (from Microsoft), EGO, Publish/Subscribe from Apple, OpenDoc, and so on. The challenge for these technologies, however, is that you need applications to support them to be useful. Many of these technologies never gained widespread use, however, because they are fairly complicated to implement.

LinkBack is different because we tackled those areas that have kept these other technologies from being adopted. First of all, we designed it to be easy for developers to implement; if you built your application using the standard Cocoa NSDocument design, it can require as little as a few dozen lines of code. We are also making the source available under a BSD license so anyone can make use of it free of charge.

Our goal with LinkBack is to bring embedded objects to the Mac in a way that is easy to implement so that it can be widely supported. That way, Mac users can gain the benefits of seamless integration between their applications, even if the applications come from different vendors.