General

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.

One of the best things about developing a word processor is that we get to use everyday for our normal work. I am writing our 2005 Marketing Plan right now (lots of graphics and tables, probably 50+ pages once I am finished.) This is my first chance to really use styles for a big-ish document. This is really exciting for me because one of the things that made me want my own word processor in the first place was my frustration with creating structured documents in Word.

Of course, my experience with Nisus Writer is probably like no one else. While I write our marketing plan, I am also testing Nisus under Tiger. When I find a bug, I report it to our engineering team or I fix it myself, which makes for a funny way of working. Tuesday I started writing and then spent most of the day instead making typing more responsive under Tiger. (Its really responsive now.) It paid off though, my writing Wednesday went much faster!

The latest issue of Macworld has a review of Nisus Writer Express. (sorry, not online yet.) We got four mice, which is excellent! (And a great improvement from our last review.) They dinged us for having no bullets and numbering and little right to left support. We are currently working on both of these features for our next release (or two). Maybe next review we can get a 5. (hehe)

EDIT: William Porter, the author of the piece reminded me that they actually dinged us only for lack of numbering, not bullets. We are always hard on ourselves than our critics. ;)

Some people have asked about my reaction to Pages. So here it is: Pages is a simple to use application for creating great looking layouts, but it doesn’t have much in the way of actual writing tools. If you are a serious writer, you need something more focused on writing like Nisus Writer.

In fact, I think Pages and Nisus Writer make great companions: Nisus for writing and Pages for layout. Especially since Nisus Writer documents can be imported by Pages.

One of the greatest advantages digital content provides is its immediate malleability. With the right software changes can be made quickly and globally. A hallmark of this flexibility is the great big undo/redo stack that nearly every piece of software maintains.

An application normally implements undo by recording inverse operations for every action the user takes. For instance, to undo adding 10 to a particular number, you simply subtract 10. When a user deletes a word from a document, the inverse operation is to simply insert that same word back in.

Looking more closely at the requirements necessary to undo the deletion of a word, you can see that you need to know not only what the word was, but where the word was located in the document. At a lower level this location is simply the number of characters that preceed the deleted word.

For instance, imagine a document containing only the text “ice is blue”. Note that the word “blue” is preceded by a total of 7 characters. So to undo the deletion of the word “blue” from the document, we simply insert the word “blue” after the 7th character in the document.

Locations are complicated by document content that automatically updates itself. One example might be a timestamp. One second the stamp could read “Thursday 23:59”, the next, “Friday 00:00”. You can see that the stamp shrunk by 2 characters. Had our imaginary document in the previous paragraph contained a timestamp such as this one, the location we need to reinsert the word “blue” at to undo the deletion would have changed. To accommodate undo after a timestamp we need to be able to describe locations in the document like “the 7th character after the 2nd timestamp”.

Happy New Year to all of our users, partners, and friends around the world. For any of you effected by the tsunami, our thoughts and prayers are with you.

In case you missed it, 2.1.1 is out. Get a complete list of changes here. This release is intended to fix some crashes a number of users were experiencing. Because it is important to us to get crashing bugs fixed as quickly as possible, we did not include fixes for every issue people have reported to us. We have another bigger release planned for a few months from now that will include these fixes.

Well, 2.1.1 is just about ready to go out the door. It turns out that when we released 2.1 is contained a timing bug that none of our beta testers (or us) caught, but many of our other users did, unfortunately. It has taken us some time to trace down this problem but we got it. This fix and a few other little things will be in the 2.1.1 release.

On another note, we are gearing up to go to MacWorld this January. We will have a small booth again this year, but we plan to have something to give away so come by our booth and check it out. I don’t know the number yet, but I will post it when I find out.

We are also starting work on our next release. Our next release should come out the first part of next year and will have some new features. I’m pretty excited about it because I think that will be the point where we will officially have a pretty good “general” word processor that we can then use to start adding lots more features targeted at specific users.

We are working on yet another update to 2.1. This one will include a number of additional bug fixes and speed improvements. Hopefully this will be the last “fixer” update; there are a number of UI enhancements I am really itching to put into place.

Phillipe has posted a French version of the Nisus Writer Express 2.1 release notes. Also, there is a French mailing list for Nisus Writer.

Voila: le version français de le info de Nisus Writer Express 2.1. Nous remercions Philippe. Aussi, il y a une liste de diffusion francophone consacrée à Nisus Writer.

Une nouvelle version est disponible avec le nombre de version correct. Téléchargez le demo.

Il y a un erreur dans cette version de Nisus. Il indique que la version est “2.1 beta 1” mais cette version est 2.1 finale. Une nouvelle version sera disponible bientôt. Merci de votre compréhension (et pour mon mauvais français).

MacGeneration was the first to cover our French localization. A highlight: “With this French localizations, French-speaking users can finally envision putting Word in the cupboard.” (My own translation/paraphrase).

Phillippe mentioned the release on his blog of course.

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.

The latest issue of About This Particular Macintosh has a very fair review of Nisus Writer Express. I am thrilled that the author mentioned the “tags” feature. It is a feature that is almost never mentioned in reviews, though it is very powerful and useful.

Just for that mention, and the very nice words about tables, I will link to his blog.

There is also a nice review in the Washington Post (thanks Mary for the link!).

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!