NWX 2 sluggish beachballs and other matters

[fjkam]

Firstly, I have to say that I love NWX 2 because of the styles etc and all the other pretty intuitive features.
But I would worship it if i didin't have so much trouble with spinning beachballs. For instance, when I move from styles view to page view, or the tool drawer to the main document, and I have forced quited countless times. This was from a document created in apple works and opened in nisus, haven't triend any docs in nisus directly yet.
Also, when i try the cut function, it deletes the "rest" of the document after the insertion point.
So, my questions are, is there something else I should be doing? Should I increase RAM? Or wait for the next NWX upgrade?

Jan

[cchapin]

Also, when i try the cut function, it deletes the "rest" of the document after the insertion point.

Are you doing this in Draft View? I've had some trouble with the end of documents seeming to disappear in Draft View in 1.1.2. If I switched to Page View, everything was still there. I haven't experienced it yet in 2.0.

--Craig

[MacSailor]

I have seen this infamous beachball more than ever before, after I upgraded to NWE 2.0. Is this something that will be fixed by a fast maintenance release or do I have to replace my Pismo with a AluBook?

[Tacitus]

I have seen this infamous beachball more than ever before, after I upgraded to NWE 2.0. Is this something that will be fixed by a fast maintenance release or do I have to replace my Pismo with a AluBook?

It's the same for me, in fact on a G4/400 it is practically unusable for all except the shortest documents. Don't get me wrong, I like the layout and the features but it is so slow. For my money this (and any bugs) are the first things that needs to be addressed in the next release.

Tacitus

[marc]

I too am finding NWE2 a bit slow, with the beachball making more than a few appearances. V1.1.2 was not a speed demon itself, but unfortunately the new version does feel a bit slower.

For NWE2 to be truly competitive, I would really like it to be speedier, or at least as fast as Word, and Mellel. Unfortunately, as compelling as it's advantages are over those other tools, if it's perceived as being slower, it could struggle gaining traction.

My top request would be additional optimisation -- assuming that there's room to manoeuvre.

[charles]

We test NWE for speed, among other things, when working with it. However, different machines have different bottlenecks. If you can, try reporting to us via Send Feedback those places to get beachballs. Tells us what you were doing when it happened and we will try to track down the bottlenecks.

I'm mostly curious where specifically you feel NWE is more sluggish.

Cheers,
-Charles

[MacSailor]

However, different machines have different bottlenecks. If you can, try reporting to us via Send Feedback those places to get beachballs. Tells us what you were doing when it happened and we will try to track down the bottlenecks.

I just sent you a couple of "bottlenecks" through the feedback. Hope it will solve the slow down problem.

[Denis]

I must say I am really impressed with NWX2. The tables and styles are great. Styles sheets are so nicely done!

I do have the same problems with sluggisness and beachballs and error dialogs appearing repeatedly. I looked into the activity monitor once when it was rather bad and Nisus was using something like 150MB of real memory for a 138k document (plus more than 200MB of virtual memory).

As someone else pointed out, this document was originally a Word document, saved in RTF and then opened in Nisus. I tried importing the Word document directly but the result was gibberish. With the 'Save as RTF' from Word it worked, although perhaps this is the reason for the sluggish performances?

[fjkam]

having seen some of the other comments, my Nisus seems to have problems with docs written in other applications and opened in Nisus. Thus, when i opened an appleworks doc in Nisus, everything is slow, even typing, but the beachballs come when i try to change views, scroll document, change to the tooldrawer. And they are recurring, which means that the insertation cursor does appear, but when i click on the document again, the beachball reappers, so there is absolute no forward progress at all.


For another appleworks doc without footnotes, I simply opened the original document in Apple works, copied text only and pasted text only on to a new Nisus file, and I didn't have any problems with the beachballs in that case, but i lost all previous attributes, including words written in Chinese. However, that file is up and running, so far, and it was about the same length-- 20 pages-- as the one with the problems.

[Bioinformatics]

Before pinning it on NWE, check that other applications are not soaking up the CPU time. Start up Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor and look at the top CPU use. I too often (for my liking) find that one of the web browsers has spun out and is busy eating all the CPU or a least a big chunk of it even though they are not the "active" application. If you are on a slower machine, this sort of thing will affect other applications.

Right now for example Firefox web browser is busy using 20%+ of the CPU whilst supposedly idle with only 6 tabs open. Firefox seems particularly bad at this.

Likewise I find downloads make the machine as a whole sluggish. Classic sometimes spins out too.

Other applications are very good at being truly idle while not in use - NWE is one (0% CPU while I'm writing this...).

[charles]

fjkam: If you can, please send us a document that is giving you these kinds of problems by choosing "Send Feedback" from the help menu.

We know that NWE is too slow for some people's liking when launching, opening new files, and scrolling for long documents. Also, the first time you switch to the Style Sheet view there will be a slight delay.

Typing, switching to the palette, choosing menus, and such should not beachball. If you experience this, the best thing you can do is to report it to us via Send Feedback. Try to report a series of steps that we can follow that will reproduce the problem you are experiencing.

We take complaints about our speed very seriously and our focus for the coming weeks will be on resolving as many of these issues as we can. (including the ones I mentioned above).

Cheers,
-Charles

[fjkam]

Just downloaded the latest version, and though the responses are slower than 2.0 for new Nisus files, files created in Nisus express, the previous problems with sluggish beachballs for files not orginally created in Nisus but now opened and saved in Nisus seem resolved. No having to continuously force quit this time.


Jan

[charles]

Hi:

What do you mean by response is slower for new files created in Nisus? Do you mean it takes longer to open a new document window? Or when you save and reopen the file, the reopened document is slower than others?

-Charles