Posts by charles

Get it here:

http://www.nisus.com/free/express.php

Well, we are ready to release 2.1. Unfortunately a flu epidemic hit our office and kept enough people out of the office we simply could not release today! Hopefully we can put it out tomorrow or Thursday.

In preparation for the new French localization of Nisus Writer Express, I thought I would point out Le blog de NisusWriter, which is a blog all about writing in French using Nisus (it is itself in French).

I hope Phillippe gets a lot more traffic when NWE2.1 comes out.

We are putting the final touches on the next release now. It will be called Nisus Writer Express 2.1. It has lots of speed improvements, many little changes you will probably never notice (unless it bothered you) and French localization!

I forgot to mention, a user tells us that we were reviewed in a German mag called MacLife. They gave us 5 stars out of 6. Pros: flexible user interface, good macro functionality, language sensitive spell checking. Cons: weak Word import (especially concerning tables and styles). The review is not online right now, but I will link to it when it comes available, I hope! Thanks Andreas for the tip off!

This will go up on our front page soon, but I thought I would mention it here too: MacUser UK printed their review of Nisus Writer Express 2.0 in this months issue (go buy it if you are in the UK…it is really a good Mac mag). 5 mice. Cool huh?

By the way, thanks to everyone for all the great input you have been posting on the comments here about features that you need and such. Your input really means a lot! I hope to have more commentary on this in the future.

Typing speed is now even better. We eliminated a few extra time wasters to keep it responsive even in very large documents. Also, we are changing how we do some thing in the background so they will not interfere with your typing. In general I can anywhere type inside a 300+ page document and Express keeps up with me. It actually does an OK job of this in general in 2.0, but we are smoothing out some rough spots that gave some people trouble sometimes.

One other change we are going to make for our Draft View-using friends: we will no long layout the page view of the document until you actually switch to it in Express. What this means is that if you open a file in Draft View, it will open much faster, but you might have to wait for a few seconds the first time to switch to Page View mode so we can do the initial typesetting. We will put up a progress indicator, of course, so you know what is happening.

Up until now, we have focused on adding “basic” word processing features and a few of the features that were unique to Nisus Writer Classic. We have added them mostly in the order of popularity: the more commonly requested features get added first. In the coming year, our strategy for adding features is going to change somewhat. Now that we have most of the basics in place for our product, we are going to focus on targeting specific niches.

We are still in the process of making a final decisions about what those niches will be, but once we decide we will be sure to let everyone know. I can say that we consider Nisus Writer to be a product family of which Nisus Writer Express is the first member.

Lowendmac had some good things to say about us:

The best word processor on the Mac, bar none. …Nisus is a great word processor, and now that it has footnote and endnote capabilities again, it’s the pick of the crop.

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.

NWE 2.0 has had one of the longest and most involved beta test phases of any product I’ve ever worked on. Earlier this week we released what I hope will be the last beta, beta 9. We have released a new beta about once a week, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less. This is a great achievement for us because in the past our software and our process of doing a beta release were not good enough to allow us to be this interactive with our testers. Martin, Dave, and Andrew have all worked hard to perfect our release process though so now we can decide to do a beta late afternoon and have it out by evening. Our entire engineering team has done a great job of keeping the app overall stable while working on their own parts. I’m very proud of the hard work all of us have done!

Clay Shirky has a great piece on how the RIAA’s efforts to shut down file sharing services and file sharing users is driving the adoption of encryption technology by mainstream users. The fact is, people will share music. It is going to happen. The RIAA can keep trying to shut these services down, but all they are doing instead is pushing these system to evolve until finally something will be created that is immune to the RIAA’s legal efforts.

Our next release will mark the beginning of a lot of new things for Nisus. Among them will be a redesign of our web-site and some of our online services. Over the last year we have started our forum and now these blogs. Next we are going to redesign our web-site to make it way easier to get to the products or services you are trying to find on our site. NWE 2.0 will also include a revised feedback engine and some new Help menu commands pointing you to the right places online to get answers when you have questions.

Why are we doing all of this? Because we want to know you, our customers! And we also want you to know about us. There is nothing that makes my day more than to hear from a customer who is happy with what we provide and feels like we listen to their concerns. It’s part of what makes this job fun so we are constantly trying to find ways to make more and more people experience us in that way.