Apple Silicon and Nisus Writer

Posted inGeneral, Nisus Writer Express, Nisus Writer ProNo Comments

Some customers have asked whether or not the new Macs with Apple Silicon will improve their Nisus Writer writing experience. The short answer is yes! Apple’s new M1 chip is really fast and Nisus Writer has native support for M1 that will definitely reduce wait times.

Let’s take a look at some firm numbers to see what you can expect. The following benchmarks were collected by comparing two humble Mac Minis:

Intel i5: 2018 Mac Mini, 16GB RAM, SSD
Apple M1: 2020 Mac Mini, 16GB RAM, SSD

Those Macs were tested using two large Nisus Writer documents. One is our Nisus Writer Macro language reference guide, and the other is our Nisus Writer Pro full user guide. Both are relatively complex documents using features like tables, bookmarks, cross-references, etc.

Now for the fun part. Let’s have the Intel and M1 Macs fight it out to see who is faster 🤓

The above graph is for our macro guide which contains 54K words, over 145 pages, with a 330K compressed file size. The results are clear: the M1 is about twice as fast as Intel. That’s awesome!

Let’s try the same common operations using our full user guide:

That’s also nearly a 2x speed improvement for the larger file which contains 227K words, over 770 pages, with a 90MB compressed file size.

If you’ve read about the M1 elsewhere you already know that it’s a significant leap forward for computing. By all accounts Apple’s new MacBooks are excellent machines. So these results are no surprise, but it’s nice to confirm that the M1 will also speed along your writing.

How to Reopen Closed Safari Windows

Posted inGeneral, TipsNo Comments

Maybe file this tip under “just open your eyes dummy” but I recently learned that Safari on macOS has a feature that allows you to reopen recently closed windows. That doesn’t mean just a single web page. You can restore a window fully, including the many tabs that were inside the window.

You can use this Safari feature via the menu History > Reopen Last Closed Window, or more generally via History > Recently Closed. I don’t expect to use this often, but we’ve all had that moment of regret after accidentally closing a window with like 10 tabs we still needed to review 🤬

Thanks to a Nisus user who tipped me off to this feature. That user was actually requesting that we add the same feature to Nisus Writer, in case a window with many tabbed Nisus documents is accidentally closed. We’ll certainly consider it as a potential future enhancement.

If you’d like to see Nisus add this feature (or any others) please get in touch with us. We love to get feedback from our users! You can leave a comment here on our blog, chat on our user forum, or contact us directly.