Wow … Festivus has come and gone so quickly! I have taken down the Festivus pole, and the Airing of Grievances still hangs in the air like a bad odor.

Yup, nothing like that to get your holidays off to a roaring start.

Seriously though, we would like to wish all of you a happy and festive holiday season.

Now let’s be safe out there!

Here is a very interesting review of Express 2.5 by Nguyen on his Interface blog.

Thanks for the great review!

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 I was able to cobble something together. It’s not beautiful, but it was a great fun to create and the result is effective enough.

Oh, I’ll be wearing a gecko costume this year (some styrofoam balls for eyes glued to a green hoodie). Anyone else? ;)

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 isn’t too annoying for you, I know the change will make poor Dave happy.

This Thursday (29 September) Jerzy Lewak, CEO of Nisus Software, will be a guest on the Tech Night Owl Live. You can listen to the show, which will be on from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Pacific Time, at the Techbroadcasting web site. Or you can download the show in Podcast form from the same site.

Happy listening!

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.

In our never ending quest to release as many beta versions as possible, I am proud to annouce Nisus Writer Express 2.5 Beta 7.

You can see what has changed on the release notes page.

Thank you all again for sending us bug reports and helping us to make this release a very solid one. Keep them coming!

It looks like Express 2.5 is getting closer. We just released Beta 4 and there are a number of bugs fixed. However, we would love to hear from people who have had problems with Classic File Conversion and Keyboard Shortcuts.

Please download the new beta, try it out, and let us know what you think by filing bug reports.

Another alpha version of 2.5 is available on our Sneak Peek page. This new alpha is compatible with Panther, so any user running 10.3 or later should be able to try 2.5 out now.

The latest alpha of Nisus Writer Express 2.5 is out. New in this version is the ability to create custom palette groups.

Download it from the Sneak Peek page.

Enjoy!

Version up, people! Download from the Sneak Peek page. Give it a look. Send us feedback.

We are getting very close to a beta release. Thank you all for your help.

In my earlier post about file formats I said:

There was a day when every word processor had its own format. The reason developers did this was to “lock” you in to using their software. The idea was that once you had all your documents stored in their proprietary format, you would have to keep buying the same software to read your documents.

But Mark recently pointed out to me that actually Nisus chose its original format specifically to avoid locking people into our format:

Actually we settled on TEXT so than *anyone* could read our documents. You might have lost the formatting, but, that did not affect the actual text. Innumerable people chose Nisus Writer Classic specifically because it stored the text as TEXT!.

The way the Nisus Writer Classic file format handles formatting was truly clever. So, I guess we’ve always had a tradition of helping our users share their files with others.

This new alpha bring right to left table support, though there will be some rough edges (hey, it’s an alpha!). There is also a fix for the LinkBack/OmniGraffle bug that some have reported.

Feel free to give this latest build a spin.

There has been some talk about file formats among our users and users of other word processors lately. I’ve seen a lot of explanations about what the different formats are and their relative benefits. Since we know a little about this stuff, I thought a little explanation of the major formats might help the conversation. So here it is, my run down of the different word processor formats and their relative strengths:

Omni just released the beta of OmniGraffle 4. Aside from its nifty new palette system, it also supports LinkBack so you can edit OmniGraffle drawings in your Nisus Writer Express documents with just a double-click. To try it out get the OmniGraffle Beta the latest preview release of Nisus Writer Express 2.5. It’s awesome!

For the brave amongst you, we have released the latest Express 2.5 Sneak Peek build. There are no release notes, but lots of bugs are squashed in this version.

You will need Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) at least to use this build.

As per normal, we do not offer support on these builds, so please do not ask. Send your feedback to sneakpeek@nisus.com or use the feedback function built into Express.

Happy Hunting!

Nisus Writer Express 2.5 is getting close. We have a few touch-ups to add, but we have mostly been fixing bugs. We have fixed about 90% of the bugs in our bug tracker now. Once we get our known issues squashed, we will go to beta before our final release.

Also, here’s something fun to do if you are using the 2.5alpha sneakpeek: Open a new document and type the word “POOF”. Now highlight the word and choose Table->Convert To Table.

The final version of Nisus Writer Express 2.1.3 is now available at the usual place. Or, you can open Express and choose the “Check for Updates” feature in Nisus Writer Express, located under the “Nisus Writer Express” menu.

No new features have been added, as this version fixes a few issues that were disconvered after Tiger was released.

Enjoy!

So lately we have released both 2.1.2 and 2.5alpha and soon we will release 2.1.3. What’s up with all these versions? Well, here’s what’s happening:

Nisus Writer Express 2.5 is the brand spanking new version of Express that we have been working on for some time. It has some cool new features like a really slick system for bullets and numbering, a better style sheet, and right to left support. Perhaps most importantly, version 2.5 will be our “bug smasher” release. We are taking the time to really clean out our bug database. We are also going to release frequent alphas and betas so that you can try out the new features if you want and report bugs to us early on while we can fix them.

In the mean time, we have made some very minor changes to our current “stable” release 2.1.1 to support the new version of Mac OS X, Tiger. This version is called 2.1.2. Several users have experienced some additional issues that we did not find in our own testing on Tiger, so we have now fixed those issues as well and we will soon release 2.1.3.

So there you have it: if you are on Tiger, please upgrade to 2.1.2 (and 2.1.3 when it is released. If you want to try out the newest features and you aren’t afraid of bugs, try the sneak peek of our new version 2.5.

We have posted a Nisus Writer Express 2.1.3 sneak peek at, appropriately enough, our Sneak Peek page.

Please feel free to check it out and send us feedback.