Month: March 2007

We had hoped by now to have released the Nisus Writer Pro public beta. However, development is taking longer than we had hoped. It happens, but personally I am not happy about it. In the end, it will result in a better word processor, but for now it is just frustrating. It’s this reason that Apple executives, when asked when Leopard will be released, say things like “the first half of 2007”.

Having said that, since the announcement of Pro we have added a few new features. For a lot of people, adding “Any Attributes” to Find and Replace will make their writing life a lot easier. Small Caps are now supported, faked or included in the font. Strikethrough colors and Shadow attributes are now supported. You can now adjust when a footnote is split between pages. MathType fans will note that you can live-edit equations pasted into Pro. That is to say, you paste an equation into Pro, you double-click on it, MathType opens, you make the changes. Save it, and the changes are automagically updated in Pro. It is very LinkBack-like. Finally, Pro now works on the latest developer build of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5).

I realize that these are not huge changes, but we decided to add them now to make life easier for us (since we were going to add them at some point anyway) and to give our users the best possible experience.

Features are now frozen, and now it’s about fixing bugs. Private beta testing is underway, and we are getting closer to having a beta release that is good enough for public consumption. When will that be? I am reluctant to say, since engineering does not know at this point. When I ask, the answer I usually get is “when it is ready.” If I press the issue, the answer is “two weeks”. I have been hearing two weeks now since January.

So, the real answer is I don’t know. I would love to be able to say March. That’s what we are hoping for. But the best answer at the moment is “when it is ready.”