Month: February 2006

Now we’ve got universal binaries of both Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Thesaurus ready for your hot little mice to download. So what goes into making a universal binary? For an application like Nisus Thesaurus, which was developed for Mac OSX from the start and has basically no file formats, it really is as easy as clicking a checkbox. Something like Express is a bit more complicated.

The problem is that PPC based Macs store numbers in memory differently than an Intel. To illustrate, how do you know that the character sequence “72” mean seventy-two and not twenty-seven? Could we not just as easily have decided that seventy-two should be written as “27”? Indeed, when speaking in German (but not writing it) you literally say “two and seventy”. PPC and Intel chips have exactly this issue, that one stores numbers from the little end to the big end, and the other in the opposite direction.

So how does this affect Express? Here’s when our old friend Nisus Writer Classic and its file format comes into the picture. All those Classic Nisus files you have sitting around from the good ‘ol days are stored using the PPC’s notion of numbers. Before your new Intel Mac can understand them the numbers need to be swapped around. It’s not a difficult problem to solve, but it is time consuming to go through the old file import code and figure out exactly what and where to swap.

While I am taking a break from watching Curling at Torino, I figured it would be a good time to mention that Express 2.6.1 is now available. There are a few bug fixes the biggest news is that Express is now a Universal Binary. Our preliminary tests show that Express is very, very fast on the new iMac. Yeah, very scientific, I know, but it’s true.

You can download the new version from here.

Now back to Curling. Really.

One of the tasks before me today was to fix a problem with our Classic Nisus Writer import code. Specifically there was a problem when pasting text with graphics (or tables) from Classic into Express. To properly fix this I had to look into our old Classic code to see exactly what it did for these situations. This was my first time taking a detailed look at the old code and to my delight I discovered a fair amount of colorful profanity regarding the problem. Nothing like having a confirming second opinion :)

But regardless of the work involved, Express 2.6.1 beta 2 is available for you cosmic kitties tonight with a few critical fixes.

Express 2.6.1 beta 1 is now out for your downloading and testing pleasure. As of this version, Express is now a Universal Binary, which means that it will run on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs. Apart from that, there are almost no changes.

You can download the latest version from this page.

Also, Nisus Thesaurus has also been updated. The only change is that it is now a Universal Binary. The beta version of Thesuarus can be downloaded on the same page as above.

Happy testing!

We finally received our Intel iMac on Friday. Very nice machine … very quiet, unlike the original iMac G5’s. You would never know you what chip it was running, except that it really does feel faster … Safari and the Finder are more responsive, for example.

So far, we haven’t used it much, except to test Express in Rosetta. It works as you would expect, we haven’t seen any issues so far. We are working on the Universal Binary version now, and should be releasing a beta any day now.

So, does anyone else have an Intel iMac? If so, let me know. I would love to hear about your experiences.