Nisus Blog

I recently came across a copy of the COVID-19 economic relief explanation letter being sent out by the White House here in the United States: What was interesting to me was not the contents of this letter, but rather the spacing after each period. You can see that there are two spaces after nearly every […]

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Sometimes the most exciting thing about an iOS update is all the new emojis. In recent history the new emojis in iOS 13.2 included several interesting characters: That last one is technically called the Ringed Planet emoji; but let’s get real, that’s Saturn. Even in emoji-form the cosmos is beautiful. These photos of Jupiter taken […]

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Nisus has been developing for the Mac for many, many years. Over that time we’ve accumulated quite a cache of old Apple Developer discs, upon which we recently stumbled. It’s efficient and economical that everything is distributed digitally now, but I can’t help but miss old gems like this. We hope you enjoy seeing these […]

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The US Navy just switched to a new message routing system that finally allows the use of lowercase letters. That’s right, up until May 7th 2013 messages could only employ ALL CAPS, ALL THE TIME. I wonder, did they add Unicode support? Or maybe they just upgraded to the decadent luxury of full ASCII.

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A competition to design a new symbol for the Indian Rupee just came to a close. The new symbol is distinct from the generic rupee symbol (“Rs” / &#x20a8, Unicode U+20A8) used by a variety of rupee currencies and is destined for inclusion in the Unicode standard. Personally I think the new symbol looks quite […]

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This tip came from one of our engineers, Martin, who writes on this blog from time to time. In previous versions of Mac OS X a user could use “Get Info” in the Finder to control which localization(s) a particular application was launched with, eg: they could disable all but one localization to force an […]

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A silly but funny little video for typography nerds. Looks to be a bit of viral marketing, but entertaining all the same!

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A neat calligraphy video filmed live and sped up. The artist’s website also has some very impressive images of “light calligraphy“.

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Whenever I pass through my local Cost Plus World Market, a place of wonderful things, I always take a walk through the candy aisle. Obviously we’re pocky fans around here, but I’ve always been more a gummy man myself. It might be my German heritage, but indeed Haribo macht mich froh. So upon a recent […]

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My favorite booth at MacWorld featured adorable penguin and dragon USB thumb drives. Apparently the company is looking for an American distributor, so hopefully we can all have cute USB buddies helping us move our files around soon.

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Now that the Nisus Writer Pro public beta is out those users interested in exploring our macro enhancements can do so. However, we thought that we should let those users know that there will be additional macro commands available by the time we release. Probably the most needed of these extra commands are those that […]

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Essentially the only thing a computer knows anything about is numbers. So when it comes time to process text you have to assign each character a particular number. These matchings form a map, which is called a character set or text encoding. Back in Nisus Writer Classic many text encodings were used. You would use […]

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To all those in the United States celebrating Thanksgiving this year, best wishes to you and your family!

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Barmy talk? Nay, today be Talk Like a Pirate Day. Get thee a watchin’ yon instructional video.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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For those users interested in such things, we have a new beta of Nisus Writer Express version 2.6. While we don’t recommend this software for casual users who want to get things done, this new beta is open to any more adventurous users. Happy holidays to you and a very merry unbirthday to me.

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One of the nice things about working for a small company like Nisus is that you don’t get bored because you’re always doing the same old thing. For instance, yesterday I had the pleasure of preparing our Halloween sale graphics. Now, I’m definitely not a graphic artist, but I’ve used PhotoShop a few times, so […]

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Recently we’ve had such a sharp rise in comment spam that moderating our comment queue was a real chore. So we’ve installed a “security code” plugin to help weed out all the automated spam. Before you can post a comment now you’ll have to copy the random digits from the security code image. Hopefully this […]

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Nisus Writer Express 2.5 final candidate 3 is now available. We’re almost done with this version, so if you haven’t tried it out yet, maybe now is a good time. If you’ve been following along, then please read the release notes for this version.

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