Greetings From Nisus Land
Snow Leopard Compatibility Beta Releases
When Apple announced on 24 August that Snow Leopard would be available on the 28th, I have to admit that it didn't surprise us. Well, maybe a little. Apple had kept telling everyone that Snow Leopard would be released in September. Most of the developer community thought that "September" meant late September. We had been working on Snow Leopard fixes for a bit of time, and we had planned on releasing our Snow Leopard versions in early to mid-September.
Looks like that plan is up in smoke.
So, having said all of that, we are pleased to announce that beta versions of Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Writer Pro are now available for your downloading pleasure.
Nisus Writer Pro 1.3.1 contains no new features, but includes fixes since Pro 1.3 was released, and the aforementioned Snow Leopard fixes. The release notes for Pro 1.3.1 can be found on the Pro 1.3.1 download page.
Nisus Writer Express 3.3.1 is a feature release. The new features include an all new document manager, a style library, the ability to attach the active document to a new email message (in Mail.app and Entourage only), a selection history (allowing users to jump to prior editing locations), an option to automatically capitalize the first word of each sentence during typing (this is disabled by default).
There are also many, many fixes (including the fixes for 10.6), all of which can be read about on the Express 3.3.1 release notes page.
Both applications are Universal Binaries and require at least Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
Please remember that these are beta versions, and not available for purchase. We will send out an announcement when we release the final versions of both applications.
In the meantime, if you have installed 10.6 and are just dying to get back to work, download Express or Pro (or both!) and, well, get to work!
Tips and Tricks
Snow Leopard Tips
Mac OS X 10.6 brings a great deal of refinement, stability, and goodwill since the price is so low. However, we have discovered a couple of interesting issues that we should talk about.
The native file format in both Nisus Writer Express and Pro is RTF (rich text format). This format is shared by many other applications, including TextEdit and Apple Mail. It has been this way since the inception of OS X. We chose this format because it is supported by just about any word processor out there. Prior to Snow Leopard, files that were created in Nisus Writer Express or Pro would always reopen in the originating application.
However, Apple has changed this behavior in 10.6. All RTF files, regardless of where they were created, will open in a single application. By default the Finder is configured to use TextEdit. Obviously, this is not good for our users and us. It will be confusing and upsetting, and frankly we aren't very happy about it. However, this behavior can be changed in a few easy steps.
The other issue is more straightforward. Rosetta, the technology that was introduced with the introduction of Intel Macs to translate PowerPC applications on the fly, does not come installed by default. This is a potential issue because the file translators we use to open .doc documents, for example, are coded for PowerPC. When you try to open a document that needs the file translator you may see an alert that will ask you to install Rosetta. If you click the "Install" button, Rosetta will then install and Nisus Writer (Express or Pro) will work as before.
Or, to avoid that alert, when you are installing Snow Leopard for the first time click on the "Customize" button and choose Rosetta.
Odd And Ends
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