Early disappointment with NWE

[tom koehler]

First, my respectful apologies to the code warriors who have worked on NWE. It can't be easy to produce a tool of such flexibility as a word processor, on a relatively new operating system. You have a long and hard job ahead of you.

Tiring of cycling between the old and the new Mac Systems, I decided to download the OSX native version of Nisus last night. I can deal with learning the new setup, but was quickly disappointed with the capabilities of NWE when compared with NW 6.5 (and even its earlier versions.) One of my first and greatest irritations however, was scrolling through the document I was working on. I can't do it! Oh, sure, hit a scrolling arrow and move about a line and a half. That's terrible! Okay, click on the slider and drag it up or down as it suits me, then. In a long document, the slightest movement of the slider gives a dizzying lurch through my file. I'm not a happy camper right now.

I've been a Nisus user since its very early days. Not wanting to deal with doing my own programming and creating macros, Nisus has always allowed me to do just about everything I ever wanted to do with a word processor. I've edited and formatted books including producing camera-ready copy. The graphics layer in Nisus has often been as much graphic capability as I've needed for some projects. Line numbering for legal documents (like an overlong city charter of 78 pages) has been one of my favorite tools. Turn it on and off as easily as toggling invisible text in the current iteration of NWE. Sadly, the line numbering macro in NWE is a near-useless kludge. The result is not even proper line numbering.

I will continue climbing the learning curve on NWE, but for serious work I will continue to work with Nisus Writer 6.5. FWIW, I am using a Power PC G4 with a gig of ram, and System 10.2.8. I've been a Mac user since the Mac+ was a new machine. Though I support myself by swinging a 10 pound hammer, tech writing is near and dear to me. (prob'ly a story there)

tom koehler

[dennisg]

As a recent American president once said, I feel your pain. Version 2.0.X is unusable for me with its hideous bugs and glacial scrolling. But I'm optimistic that 2.1 -- due out any minute now -- will fix the problems. If not...

[dshan]

It seems you may be another victim of the recent redesign of Nisus's website--where all mention of the differences between the old NW 6.5 and the new NWE were expunged (marketing alas). As has been stated in this forum many, many times NWX (as the moniker "Express" in the name may hint) is NOT simply a port of the old NW 6.5 to Mac OS X, it's not feature-for-feature identical with NW, nor indeed does it (currently) support the same list of features as NW 6.5. It's a complete rewrite using Coca under Mac OS X and lacks many of the more advanced features old NW had/has. It implements several that they do share differently to the old NW too.

Nisus are steadily adding features to NWE to make it a more complete WP pkg (2.0 has many more than 1.0 had) but if you want my personal opinion (I have no connection with Nisus aside from being a customer) I suspect the product currently called Nisus Writer Express will NEVER have all the features of NW 6.5. Clearly Nisus intend to put out a family of WP/DM/DTP products based on the NWE engine/foundation, and charge more for the more feature-rich later ones (they're a business don't forget). That way those who only need basic WP can buy in cheaply via NWE and those who want a more feature-rich environment can pay more for Nisus Writer Pro (or somesuch) later on (I'm sure there will be generous upgrade pricing for long time loyal NWE users when these later products arrive..

As to your specific issues it is true that NWE 2.0.1 is very slow scrolling large docs. This was no problem for me until recently as most of mine were only 20-30 pages at most (loading and scrolling such docs is quite fast with 2.0.1), but recently I had to convert a 280+ page Word doc and even after saving it to native RTF in NWE it takes forever to load and scrolling with the arrows is very, very slow. Hopefully 2.1 will improve things here for large documents.

I've only played with the line numbering macro in NWX, but it does seem to number the lines so I'm not sure what the problem is there (I guess old NW did it differently in some way?)

[rmark]

I suspect the product currently called Nisus Writer Express will NEVER have all the features of NW 6.5.

For example, Nisus Writer Classic enabled you to record sounds directly into your word processing document. Some people truly depended on that for their work. Don't expect it in Nisus Writer Express! Not that we're opposed to it, it's just that there are far too many specifically word processing tasks to do first, second, third, etc.

[joao]

Tom -

I can somewhat understand your frustration, but have to add that at this point in the development of OS X there really isn't _any_ word processor out there that matches the feature sets _and_ ease of use that was available prior to the release of OS X. (I'll admit Word comes close, but the bloat, the bugs, the potentnial macro viruses and the price just don't make it an option).

I wasn't able to use Nisus Express 1.x for any word processing purposes, but have found that 2.x fills a great deal of my needs, and gives me an ease of use unrivalled by other programs. I've also been one of the lucky ones who have not been affected by scrolling issues.

There are some definite improvements in Nisus Express over Nisus Classic (which was my favorite word processor). The tables feature is simply the best I've seen for any Mac word processor (although it does need a little bit of work with page jumps), the interface really is far more intuitive, and I'm really delighted with the quality of text rendering. In all, I have been so impressed with the increase of features and functionality that Nisus has show in 2.x over 1.x that I feel quite confident that it's headed in a very strong direction.

I miss the incredibly easy Macro recording, and a few elements of the graphics layer, but as someone who left OS 9 behind a while ago, NWE shows, for me, the best potential for developing an OS X word processor that combines high-end features with greater ease of use.

Given the sudden drop in features and functionality of word processors since the introduction of OS X, I have to wonder if some of the blame actually falls on Apple's feet. I'm not a programmer or developer, but those I know feel that Apple has not been quite a forthcoming in creating as robust a developing environment as their PR states, and suggest that comments be directed not only at software developers, but also at Apple (which I have done). There are a lot of terrific things about a lot of Cocoa programs, but just about all of the ones I've seen (save Apple's) seem to hit a wall at some point when it comes to adding the kinds of features that we saw with previous versions of Mac OS.

This is just an observation and theory - I have nothing with which to back it up other than some outside comments - but I recommend you keep following Nisus' developments. It does look like it will be balancing features and ease of use better than anything so far on the market.

[tom koehler]

In NWE, line numbering is done with a macro. The line numbers become part of the text field of the document. Not every physical line on the page is numbered. The macro has a different idea than I do, what constitutes a line to be numbered. If you want the numbering to go away, you have to "undo" the operation which created the numbers and put them in the text - I think it was a "paste" operation. Depending on how many undos NWE is capable of, and how much work you did after executing the line numbering macro, you may have a real nasty job on your hands to make the line numbers disappear.

In NW 6.5 and earlier versions, line numbering is a simple toggle which reveals otherwise invisible line numbers which appear in a nice neat column at the left edge of the document. Depending on the type size and line spacing and top/bottom margin settings there could be 50-60 lines to a page of 11 inch paper. The numbers are there, whether there is text on a given line, or not. A document could consist of several pages, with some pages deliberately blank, for instance, and there would still be a neat column of line numbers running down that blank page. To make the line numbers go away, it was a simple matter to turn off line numbering. It worked just the same as turning on or off the invisible characters on a page. That is, showing or hiding the return characters, and space and tab characters. Those characters are always there, and a toggling command reveals or hides them. Nothing has been added or removed from the document. There is no operation to "undo" to make line numbering go away. The process is simply toggled on and off.
tom k.