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 one encoding for English text, another encoding for Hebrew, another for Japanese, and so on.

The problem with this approach is that to properly understand a sequence of characters a program needs to know what text encoding was used. This assumes that all programs know all text encodings. If the encoding was unknown your text was as good as gibberish. To make matters worse some fonts had custom encodings. If you lost that font your text was again foobared.

Luckily those days are over thanks to Unicode, a character set designed to include every single character known to humans. Now your text, be it Arabic, Tibetan, or Thai, only requires one standard encoding that all modern software understands. And thanks to the foresight of the Unicode Consortium we even have an official numeric assignment for the snowman character.

Happy Holidays!

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

One of my favorite days of the year, Halloween, is here! You probably noticed our web site is a bit different, but have no fear, that will only last a day or so.

Scary, isn’t it?

For the Mac Halloween type person, you can download a Jack-O-Lantern screen saver.

Now, for those who

• Really love Halloween
• Are very adventurous
• Are just plain crazy

You can mangle your Mac or PC like these loons:

Build Your Own Mac-O-Lantern

Enjoy the day, and be safe out there!

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

Macsimum News has published a very nice review of Nisus Writer Express. In his review, Dennis Sellers says that “Nisus Writer Express is fast, flexible and as friendly as the Mac itself.”

You can read the entire review here.

We know that people have been wanting these for quite a while now. Sorry it has taken so long, but we are happy to announce that we now have Nisus Writer Express printed manuals available. The cost is $15.00 plus shipping and they can be ordered from our store.

We also offer Express and a printed manual combo for $89.95. That particular item can be ordered from here.

Seth Godin, author of such books as Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers and All Marketers Are Liars, has switched his main writing tool to Nisus Writer Express.

On his blog, Seth writes “So, there’s no version of Word optimized for the new MacBook. In fact, my copy keeps crashing my crash-proof machine. I just switched to Nisus. Let’s see, it’s faster, cheaper, compatible, more reliable, optimized and friendly.”

I didn’t realize that Seth was such a Mac person. Perhaps I missed the very Apple.com like look to his site. Or the numerous mentions of Apple products.

Perhaps I am just a bit slow.

Anyway, Seth’s blog is an interesting read, to say the least. Plus, you can even click on his head! How many web sites offer that feature?

Thanks for the mention, Seth, and thanks for switching.

Have any of you seen the new ads from Apple? If you want to have a look, they are here. This is the first time since the “Switch” ads of a few years ago that I can recall Apple trying to sell the “Macintosh” as a whole, instead of an individual computer like the new iMac.

I have seen some commentary both in praise and in concern. I could see where the virus angle could bite them in the rear, but why not play that angle? It is essentially true, isn’t it?

My favorites are the iLife and the Network ads. I like them because they really show the strength of the Mac vs. the PC.

So what do you think?

Those of you who are using iListen can now use it with Nisus Writer Express. The fine folks at MacSpeech have released a ScriptPak for Nisus Writer Express. This ScriptPak installs over 300 commands into iListen that will allow the user to do just about anything by voice that you would do with menu or keyboard commands.

Pretty cool, huh?

The ScriptPak for Express sells for $19.00. iListen 1.6.8 sells for $99.00.

Now if they would only release a ScriptPak that would dress and feed me.

Yeah, I am that lazy.

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 as clicking a checkbox. Something like Express is a bit more complicated.

The problem is that PPC based Macs store numbers in memory differently than an Intel. To illustrate, how do you know that the character sequence “72” mean seventy-two and not twenty-seven? Could we not just as easily have decided that seventy-two should be written as “27”? Indeed, when speaking in German (but not writing it) you literally say “two and seventy”. PPC and Intel chips have exactly this issue, that one stores numbers from the little end to the big end, and the other in the opposite direction.

So how does this affect Express? Here’s when our old friend Nisus Writer Classic and its file format comes into the picture. All those Classic Nisus files you have sitting around from the good ‘ol days are stored using the PPC’s notion of numbers. Before your new Intel Mac can understand them the numbers need to be swapped around. It’s not a difficult problem to solve, but it is time consuming to go through the old file import code and figure out exactly what and where to swap.

While I am taking a break from watching Curling at Torino, I figured it would be a good time to mention that Express 2.6.1 is now available. There are a few bug fixes the biggest news is that Express is now a Universal Binary. Our preliminary tests show that Express is very, very fast on the new iMac. Yeah, very scientific, I know, but it’s true.

You can download the new version from here.

Now back to Curling. Really.

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 these situations. This was my first time taking a detailed look at the old code and to my delight I discovered a fair amount of colorful profanity regarding the problem. Nothing like having a confirming second opinion :)

But regardless of the work involved, Express 2.6.1 beta 2 is available for you cosmic kitties tonight with a few critical fixes.

Express 2.6.1 beta 1 is now out for your downloading and testing pleasure. As of this version, Express is now a Universal Binary, which means that it will run on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs. Apart from that, there are almost no changes.

You can download the latest version from this page.

Also, Nisus Thesaurus has also been updated. The only change is that it is now a Universal Binary. The beta version of Thesuarus can be downloaded on the same page as above.

Happy testing!

We finally received our Intel iMac on Friday. Very nice machine … very quiet, unlike the original iMac G5’s. You would never know you what chip it was running, except that it really does feel faster … Safari and the Finder are more responsive, for example.

So far, we haven’t used it much, except to test Express in Rosetta. It works as you would expect, we haven’t seen any issues so far. We are working on the Universal Binary version now, and should be releasing a beta any day now.

So, does anyone else have an Intel iMac? If so, let me know. I would love to hear about your experiences.

Express 2.6 is out. This is mainly a bug fix release, though there are a few new features such as optional WYSIWYG font menu, smart to straight quote conversion and vice versa, document selection restoration when reopened, and French and German localization.

You can download from here. The release notes can be read on this page.

Next up is a Universal Binary release. I would like to think that is coming soon, but we still don’t have a production Intel iMac to test with as of this writing. Hopefully within the next week we shall have it, and then we can test properly.

Or not.

I am writing this from the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. I was trying to get a look at a production Intel iMac (the Macs on the show floor are pre-production) but I can barely get in the door. Quite a popular place, this Apple Store. They don’t actually have any Intel iMacs at the moment, which is a shame, but understandable. Apparently, shipping immediately does not actually mean that it is now shipping. Go figure.

Got to meet Rick Schaut today. Very nice man, in spite of his affiliation with Microsoft. He really isn’t the enemy, folks. Got to play with the MacBook Pro today. They wouldn’t let me install Express on the machine, but it was fun anyway. I don’t know if the new machines are actually 4 times faster than the G5, but you can really feel the difference. The universal binary Apple apps are very fast. The biggest surprise to me is Safari, which is lightening fast on these machines. Sites that usually will induce the spinning beach ball now just render the page without a fuss. it is really a noticeable improvement.

The downside of course is that Classic is officially tossed in the trash can. I am sure there will be emulators but if you are still doing things with Classic applications, buy the last of the G5 machines now. And I mean now. Rosetta is very nice software, but your non-native Intel applications will run slower. That is, if MS Word is any indication. Heh.

Google has a booth right behind us. Normally it would bug us to have so much traffic around our booth, but people have to come by our booth to get to them, so at that point we pounce! Actually, the bad thing about them being so popular is that they are sucking the bandwidth from the rest of us. Hey, there are tradeoffs.

One more day, so if you are in the area, please feel free to come by. With or without pants.

It’s day two here at Moscone, and there is still a huge buzz from yesterday. You can’t see the new Intel machines for the people. The lines are usually 4 or 5 deep, just to put your hands on one! If that is any indication, they are going to sell a lot of these new machines.

We are very busy at our booth. Lot’s of feature requests, and a surprising amount of praise. Everyone wants to know when Express will be “Intel Ready”. If you believe Apple, most Cocoa applications are just a checkbox away from a Unviersal Binary. That’s not necessarily the case. For us, the Classic file converter will need some work to make it usable on the new machines, for example. This may take a long time, or it may not take any time at all.

Once we release Express 2.6, we will begin work on the Intel compatible Express. I don’t have a timetable for its release, but I can say that it will be a free upgrade.

And for you brave early Intel Macintosh adopters, we salute you!

Bet you didn’t see that coming. I sure didn’t. No one that I talked to said much, if anything, about new Power/MacBooks. If anything, the thought was iBooks or MacMinis. The iMac just got refreshed not that long ago, so an Intel iMac was a bit of a shock as well.

As for performance, I didn’t get much time on one. It’s a mob scene at the moment, and I would have to commit several acts of violence just to get close. Not that I mind, but it’s probably not a good idea. Yet. But, I can say that they feel much faster in all of the tasks I tried. That’s subjective I realize, but that’s all I have to work with at the moment.

Apart from that, not much new. Updated iLife with iWeb (well, I told you!), updated iWork, though I have to admit I am not sure what those changes are just yet. (Steve Jobs sort of skipped over iWork in the keynote. Thanks, Steve!) We are working the booth, so not much chance to get out and explore.

But I will.

As I walked into Moscone Center today I noticed a couple of things. The Apple Computer area has a big black curtain that prevents anyone from getting even the slightest hint of what’s coming. Security personel were there, just in case someone got a bit too adventurous.

The second thing I noticed was the buzz. I have been to many of these things, and it seems to me that there is an … atmosphere at this one that hasn’t been present in other Macworld Expos. There is a lot of anticipation, and some dread from fellow developers. Mostly anticipation, though.

It looks like this Expos is the one that introduces Mac users to the world of Intel chips in their Mac. I think that is what developers are dreading. Apart from that, rumors are all over the map. In no particular order, I have heard:

• Intel iBooks
• Intel MacMinis
• Intel iMacs
• Intel PowerBooks
• Plasma screen TV’s (I am not making that up).
• Updated iLife (with iWeb!)
• New/Updated iPods
• Updated iWork
• Mobile Phone
• Tivo-like software
• New Airport base stations

It isn’t likely all of this will happen. Still, I would be surprised if we didn’t see new Intel-based machines of some sort. Very suprised. We will see on Tuesday.

As for Nisus, we will be showing Express 2.6, but there will be no major announcements. Hey, we are just happy to be there! Really. We are at booth 107, just in case you are in town. Just don’t blink, or you will miss us.

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.