Nisus Writer Pro, OpenOffice and Rosetta - why I bought Pages.app

I've been a longtime user of Nisus Writer Pro. There's a lot of good things about it, but what I most like is the native file format. NWP uses RTF, the closest thing we have to a standard document format.

What liked least, though, is NWP's .doc import. It's slow and troubled.

Today I discovered something I liked even less. Our MacBook fan was running full tilt, but I couldn't see any explanation. Process Explorer didn't show anything grabbing CPU -- at least nothing I could recognize.

Then I sorted by memory allocation -- and I found OpenOffice.org taking up a very large amount of memory. Process Explorer told me it was running in Rosetta as PPC code.

That made no sense. OO wasn't running; it's not even installed on that machine Mail.app, Safari and Nisus Writer Pro were the only apps running. So I quit them one at a time. When I finally quit NWP the OpenOffice process died.

A few moments later the now Rosetta free 10.6 machine cooled down. The fan went silent.

There's not much on this around the web. Google found only the one post ...

Modified OpenOffice source code
Nisus Writer Pro (versions 1.2 to 2.0 inclusive) use modified OpenOffice code to help with the import/export of certain file formats. Under the OpenOffice license any modified copies of the source code must be published and made available. The source code used by Nisus Writer Pro can be downloaded below.

I'm on 1.4.2.

I think that explains why their .doc import was so slow and problematic. NWP was spinning up Rosetta code. It also explains months of mysterious battery killing machine baking problems.

NWP has now switched to LibreOffice (2.0.1)
Changed: import: switched DOCX/.doc file importers from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. This fixes a variety of problems, including cases of garbled text, formatting bleed, etc. Also made some other fixes to import process.

I suspect they had to do this to run on 10.7.

I could pay the money to go from 1.4.2 to 2.0.1 -- but I feel like a chump.

I'm buying Pages for $20, or about $6/machine.


Related

• Word processing on OS X: my personal choices (11/07)
• Nisus Writer Professional: the undocumented but critical improvement (4/09)
• Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love (6/08)

Update 5/29/2012: I don't think I ever did a formal review of Pages. Here are some quick impressions after use with one longish project.

• Pages is 90% of the way to being a robust and full featured project. Unfortunately there's no sign that Apple intends to finish it; if anything their current directions are away from traditional applications like Pages.app and Numbers.app. 
• Pages doesn't need a major rewrite or redo. It needs the 10% gap filled.
• Pages is somewhat buggy, but less buggy than any version of Word I've used. So it's bugs are acceptable. I've learned to work around them.
• Pages has a workable implementation of Style Sheets. That's better than 17 years of Microsoft Word (to be fair Word had great Style Sheets prior to 1995 or so).
• It's annoying that Tables cannot contain Tables.
• Pages limited import capability, particularly for Apple/Claris wordprocessors of old, is very annoying. (I wonder if Apple/Claris no longer has access to the code for those old file formats.)

Nisus Writer Professional: the undocumented but critical improvement

A year ago I was disappointed to learn that Nisus Writer Professional didn't handle inserted images very well ...

Gordon's Tech: Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love

... NWP doesn't do image compression! Word has fabulous image compression, so a 2MB Word document can balloon into a 32MB NWP/NWE document....

I'm now on version 1.2, but there's been no reference to any change in how NWP handles images.

Today I retested with a 2.5MB JPEG (high quality compression). An uncompressed TIFF version of this image is 20MB and a compressed PNG is 10MB

Prior to testing an empty Nisus RTF document was 32K. After insertion it was 5MB.

So Nisus is now doing some form of image compression when documents are saved.

This is a big deal for me, but obviously not for most buyers!

I'm glad they made the fix, I feel better now about sticking with NWP.

Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love

Nisus Writer Professional is not cheap for families. The license covers a single user at a time, so a family like ours with 5 users would need to spend $200 for use on a single machine. Other software has similar policies, but Nisus is very explicit about this during installation. Word and Pages leave such details to the imagination.

On the other hand, some testing shows NWP doesn't enforce the license (though for all I know NWP reports violations). They also have a generous upgrade policy for past licensees.

What else can I criticize about NWP/Nisus Writer Express?

• HTML export is pretty darned unimpressive
• I'm annoyed that NWE didn't survive the migration from 10.4 to 10.5.3. Many of my old apps run fine in 10.5.3, but NWE locked up when I tried to import a simple Word 97 document.
• NWP can't translate a Word Table of Contents into a NWP Table of Contents and vice-versa.
• NWP doesn't do image compression! Word has fabulous image compression, so a 2MB Word document can balloon into a 32MB NWP/NWE document.
  

I'll have more to say about the good things after I play with NWP a bit more. NWE has been my word processor of choice, and, even with the family licensing costs, we're staying with Nisus.

I'll point out one marvelous sign that most everyone else will miss. Nisus has a 400 page work-of-love PDF manual, which is sold as a bound book for $25.

These people love their product. That's a very encouraging sign.

There are some other things, from my time with Nisus Writer Express, that I expect

Word processing on OS X: my personal choices

A colleague asked me about what I use for word processing on the Mac. I started to respond, then realized it could be a quick post.

Briefly, I use Nisus Writer Express (NWE). It uses .RTF or .DOC as its native file format; that one absolute requirement of mine wiped out all the alternatives except Microsoft Word -- and I don't like Word. NWE is Cocoa native and works well with OS X services, it does the basics well. It has a great UI and has been fast and reliable in my experience. My wife uses it without any problems.

I haven't written any very long documents with it however.

Nisus has recently released Pro version of NWE. I'll eventually upgrade to, but it's a low priority for me. If the Pro version had a true outliner I'd probably have done it by now.

Nisus does a fair job importing simple Word documents, but even the Pro version can't import a Word Table of Contents. That's disappointing, since I use Word TOCs quite a bit. Nisus is, however, a much more agreeable word processing tool than Word. For one thing, the Styles actually make sense.

OS X 10.4 ships with TextEdit which uses a "package" version of RTF, but it's too feature sparse. The version in 10.5 is said to be closer to a true word processor and it has support for Microsoft's XML and the ODF file formats (inherited from 10.5). I've no experience with 10.5 though -- and I won't for months to come.

Pages, part of Apple's iWork suite, uses a proprietary Apple XML file format. That rules it out for me.

The only remaining alternatives are Word for Mac or Word 2003/2007 running in a Win2K or XP VM (VMWare or Parallels).

If all my machines were MacTel and I didn't use Nisus, I'd probably run Word 2003 in my Win2K VM. The tyranny of the .DOC file format should not be underestimated.

Update 2/28/2008: I've unfortunately become aware of Nisus Achilles heel. It can't compress embedded images. So a 3 MB JPEG embedded in a Nisus document produces a 20MB file -- Nisus stores the image as an uncompressed bitmap. Word compresses embedded images, and allows them to be clipped. I'm curious to see what Pages does.

Update 10/13/2008: When I moved my machines to 10.5 I also upgraded to Nisus Writer Pro. I haven't tested to see if it still has the bitmap problem, but it does have other issues. In a document where I used huge fonts (visually impaired user) Nisus was slow to redraw some pages. An image positioned using Nisus Writer Pro vanished when the document was opened in an older version of Nisus Writer Express. I have also become aware of how much I miss a drawing tool layer. AppleWorks drawing tools were particularly good, they really played to the strengths of AppleWork's compound document model. I might take another look at iWork, though that is a return to proprietary document formats. I do wish the rest of the world cared more about document longevity!

Nisus Pro has been released

Nisus Writer Pro is a $45 upgrade for Express users. Express is my favorite wordprocessor. I'll be looking at an upgrade for me, not sure if I'll do the family pack though -- I'm the one who likes the advanced stuff.

More after I try it for a while. Good news!

Using the OS X Dictionary and Thesaurus

The purest of the pure OS X apps support a full suite of OS X services, including Apple's Dictionary and Thesaurus. This includes Nisus Writer Express and Safari,
but not, surprisingly, Camino [see update re: camino] and certainly not Firefox. A TUAW comment suggests changing the kb shortuct:

...The built in dictionary is a nice app that is often useful. With most of Apple's apps you can hover over any word and press Command ^ D to get the definiton instantly.

This, however, is an odd key combination and the info goes away as soon as you release the keys.

If you set it up with a toggle key, like F12, the mini-dictioanry will stay put until you hit the toggle key again.

You can also now move the mouse to any word(s) you wish for instant access to multiple definitions...

I use opt-F12, because F12 is the default for widgets and one day I may find one I really like. This nicely improves this feature. The dialog box has a drop down icon that lets you switch to Thesaurus mode, and when the app is up you can use preferences to change the thesaurus/dictionary priority.

Update 5/8/07: Why it doesn't work in Camino

I asked Camino's developers about this. It's not enough for an application to be Cocoa, to benefit from the dictionary and integrated spell-checking the application also has to make use of OS X text rendering controls. That's not feasible for Gecko. They are looking at enabling dictionary access through other means, but there's no version for that yet.

Joel on VBA for Macintosh and the Office alternatives

Another example of Microsoft on the skids: VBA for Macintosh goes away (Joel on Software).

Joel wrote the spec for VBA. It was a lock-in strategy from start, which is no surprise of course. The loss of VBA on the Mac won't have much impact on most users of Office/Mac, but Joel's story is interesting for several reasons:

1. It's a story about Microsoft's only great product - Excel.
2. Joel's a longtime supporter of Microsoft as a company (he grew up there) and even he's advising friends to avoid Vista at this time.
3. He gets fed up with Office 2007.

Most Mac users who really need Office are going to run Office Pro/Windows in emulation under Windows 2000 or XP. I don't care so much about VBA, but I need Microsoft Access.

Mac users who want a quality word processor should probably use Nisus Writer Express (Pro is in beta). Every other product that works well on the Mac uses a lock-in proprietary file format or an (unfortunately) little supported open alternative. NWE uses RTF.

For presentations, if you can escape PowerPoint (few can) I hear Keynote is good. For an end-user non-pro database you're limited to Filemaker (kind of hurting really). For a spreadsheet you can, err, uhhh, hmmm. That' s a problem, isn't it? When I started writing this post I didn't know of any. I decided to research the question first ...

I was able to find 6 alternatives, not counting OpenOffice since it still requires an X Window front-end:

1. AppleWorks if you can find a copy (runs in cpu emulation on intel macs)
2. MarinerCalc 5.5.1
3. Google Apps with Firefox/Camino (not Safari)
4. Tables
5. Mesa (NextStep originally) is still around and is a universal binary
6. NeoOffice: (update 5/29/07: I tried the spreadsheet with a modestly large data series. It died trying to create a chart. It's not a real contender.)
   

Coda and Fission: Nice action on the OS X app front

OS X 10.5 is MIA [1] and so is iWorks 3 (OS X spreadsheet), Aperture 2 (working date metadata and faster than a dead slug), iLife 2007 (2008?), Safari 3 (a modern browser?), a blog editor, .Mac that's worth something ... argh. There's no putting a pretty face on it, Apple seems to have taken 2007 off to work on my iPhone.

So it's especially good news to hear of two very interesting OS X product releases: Coda (DF review) and Fisson. Nisus Professional for OS X is also in beta and OpenOffice is supposed to come out for OS X (no X Windows) this summer.

[1] I worry about the Fall delivery considering the challenge of iPhone -- when big projects slip once they almost always slip three times. By that rule 10.5 will come in 2008.

iWorks MIA: OpenOffice and NeoOffice

It's been years since AppleWorks was retired, but there's still no full replacement. Apple's 10.5 delay bodes poorly for anything soon.

Time to look again at NeoOffice and OpenOffice.

NeoOffice is now on version 2.1. It's still Java based, but it has an Aqua UI and doesn't require X11. NeoOffice has been ailing ever since Apple deprecated Java as a development environment, but the small team of international volunteers is still working on it. I'll test it out, being sure to install the most recent patches. It now comes with an app that installs support for Spotlight search of OpenOffice document formats.

OpenOffice 2.2 is still dependent on X11, so it's not a consideration for our home. However, there's a tentative date for a true OS X version: Digg - Timetable Announced For Native Aqua OpenOffice - Public Release in May

OpenOffice has a very well done Wiki on the Aqua (not Cocoa!) project, including minutes from the March 30th meeting. It's encouraging news, suggesting there might be something we'd use ready for late summer. I wouldn't consider replacing Nisus Writer Express, which has been excellent (Nisus Writer Pro is in beta now), but a decent Excel clone and PowerPoint reader would be very helpful. Note that "Aqua" doesn't mean OpenOffice will become a full fledged Cocoa application with services integration, system spell checking, etc. It won't show off the (aging) advantages of OS X as well as NWE or even iWorks.

Nisus Writer Pro: pending in the spring

Nisus Writer Express is our family wordprocessor. I like it very much, but there are a few things I miss. Nisus Writer Pro sounds like it will have most of them. I do hope the upgrade pricing will be reasonable. I wonder if they'll support open document format, but their key value is selling a very solid and well structured wp that uses RTF -- the only real "universal" (meaning Word users open it without paying attention) document format.

Spotlight for a Simple Finder user: How?

Update 12/12/06: You can't delete a file in Simple Finder.

Think about it.

Simple Finder is proof positive that Apple is quite capable of producing absolute cr*p. I wasted several hours of work experimenting and learning Apple's undocumented Simple Finder, only to realize I could create files in SF, but I couldn't delete them.

Simple Finder in OS 8 was an important addition to the OS. In OS X it's an blight, a festering sore, a sick joke on Apple's customers. (Can you tell I'm annoyed?).

--------------------

My mother's Mac Mini will run Simple Finder -- at least for a while. I've been experimenting with SF and, if one ignores the official way to configure it and uses the 'Full Finder' configuration method (more on all this is a later post, I'll create a future link) I think it will work. Nisus Writer Express, which can be configured to look and feel like a very simple word processor (it's really quite powerful), will be her writing tool.

The biggestA relatively minor problem is that Simple Finder knocks out Spotlight. That's right, there's no way for an SF user to use Spotlight to find items. Kind of ironic, since Spotlight is in part a response to the complexity of the folder/hiearchy world.

So now I'm looking for a Spotlight front end. I searched on one I've licensed (MoRU), that led me this post where the comments mention a few others [1]: Hawk Wings: Two apps for a smarter Spotlight. I'll also play with Launchbar and see how that will work -- but a simple Spotlight front-end that works with Simple Finder, and that can be constrained to only search Documents, is what I'm looking for. I'll see if I can configure MoRU to do that.

Any suggestions?

[1] My favorite technique for finding good reviews of a class of products is to find two product names, search on the two together, then find three, search on the three together, etc. Chances are a review that discusses 2-3 competing products is a genuine review, not a fake.

Update 12/12/06: I tried creating a smart folder that would emulate a spotlight interface, using the trick of defining the smart folder to show all files created in the past 99 years. Alas, smart folders are inert in Simple Finder. Then I tried MoRU ($10). It works pretty well, and with a bit of tweaking I was able to create a simple interface. It even supports zooming the UI. So far MoRU is looking like a good bet, but I'll try a few others.

OS X auto-complete: who knew?

Daring Fireball: Can I Get an "Hallelujah" for Auto-Completion With the Esc Key?. Hit F5, get an auto-complete drop down. Works in Nisus Writer Express. In 10.4 the Esc key does the same thing. Who knew? It raises the old usability question -- how do users learn about these occult features? What happens when one runs out of keyboard bindings (on laptops F5 controls the volume, you have to type Fn-F5 to get this).

Practically speaking auto-complete is extremely important for pen text entry, but it's far less useful for keyboard text entry. As DF notes it might help when one is unsure how to spell a word.

Adding a keyboard shortcut to an OS X Service

[I did this post to solve a problem, but it turned out there were far better solutions. So I cleaned it up a bit and moved it here, because the techniques may have other uses.]

Suppose you want to assign a shortut key to a Service item. For example, the OS X 10.3 and 10.4 -- "speech service". Select a word or phrase, choose 'Speak' and the machine speaks. Cool.

Here's how to do it.

This service is available in all Cocoa apps, such as Nisus Writer Express and Safari (but not Firefox -- it's not Cocoa ... yet). Alas, it's tedious to invoke. You have to select text, go to the menu item, etc.

But could I assign this service a shortcut? Google was again my best friend, it found Mac Modding Shortcuts, a tutorial on how to assign keyboard shortcuts to menu items (Cocoa apps only methinks). I didn't know if this would work for services, which are not really part of an application menu, but it does (with one glitch).

You can read the tutorial, or if you're brave you can find the OS X System Preferences, select Keyboard, then select Shortcuts then select Applications, add a shortcut as per the picture below. (You'll probably need the full tutorial really, this is kind of obscure. For example, you have to quite Safari before you do this assignment.) Note these shortcuts are user specific, they don't apply to all users on a machine.

The first time I did this I missed that the 'Menu Title' isn't a name I'm giving the shortcut, it's the EXACT verbiage used in the menu. I guess this utility uses a text matching rule to find what to invoke. I assigned Option-S to the shortcut. I did it only for Safari.

One bug is that it doesn't work the first time on you use it after launching Safari. You have to speak something using the menu method before the shortcut works. Tiger doesn't have this bug, but you still need to exit Safari before creating the shortcut.

One less reason to buy Office for the Mac: Google Spreadsheets

It's hard to build a web 2.0 wordprocessor. On the other hand, a web 2.0 spreadsheet seems far simpler. Now Google is launching one.

Now, not every lab product Google does is good. I still haven't found a use for Google Base, and I was very excited about that one. One problem they have is with privacy -- Google's default is to share, but that's not what I usually want with this stuff. I want ownership. Google's blog reader was bloody awful when I last looked. Their Calendar stuff seemed good, but the Gmail integration is dumb and I need to deal with PDA sync -- which they don't support.

On the other hand, look at the example they provide on their intro page -- a little league schedule. Exactly what I need to fuss with. More of a simple database than a spreadsheet really, but if they do iCal integration...

There's also the Mac implications. The biggest gap in the Mac world is the spreadsheet. FileMaker is a decent personal database (though one with an uncertain future!), and Nisus and Pages are tolerable writing solutions. AppleWorks, the only spreadsheet app, has been sunset. The main alternative to Office's spreadsheet, therefore, might be this one.

If it doesn't work with Safari, this might tip me to a Cocoa version of Firefox (Camino) as a test ... Google tends to support Safari last, if at all.

Gamma and Windows Media Photo Spec: great resource for the photo geek

Microsoft requires one to sign a EULA to view their Windows Media Photo Specification spec. I've done that, and probably given them naming rights on our first grandchild. Of course promises to all powerful unregulated monopolies don't count -- ethically anyway.

Microsoft's inevitable evil aside, it's a well written document, available, of couse, only in Word's proprietary file format (the free viewers are windows only). Nisus Writer Express opens it -- with the usual mangling. The part that caught my attention was the discussion of Gamma, something that's otherwise been a mystery (read this too). Since I don't want to spend the next fifty years chopping rocks, I'll paraphrase.

Image related devices need to make the best use of limited resources (sensor response, storage, internal data paths, processing capabilities, power utilization). To do this they have their own internal schemes for assigning numeric values to "colors" (frequencies) and "brightness steps" [1].

The color part (aka gamut) is bad enough, but with color profiles and the like there's a somewhat standard way to transform an image between viewing devices. Somewhat is the operative word here, because even in the OS X world this is done incompetently. (Forget XP -- there you have to live in Adobe.)

The brightness steps are the real nasty. The WMP spec claims that "brightness steps" are a part of the color profile, but I've never seen software handle them. These "brightness steps" are the "gamma curve".

Brightness steps, alas, are a non-linear transformation. (This is when I wish I hadn't ducked Caltech's famously nasty applied maths course, so the best I can say here is that I wonder if "non-linear" is computationally problematic.) The brighteness steps are simplified as a single numerical value representing the non-linear transformation as a "power function".

Although the Microsoft spec claims that color profiles contain information on gamma, I've never seen any image rendering software do the transformations needed to correct brightness steps based on the gamma of, say, a default Mac display setting (OS X allows me to set my display "gamma", but the appearance of the UI changes, so the UI is not being transformed to match the new display setting.).

Decades ago Apple went with a gamma of 1.8 and IBM chose 2.2. (I think Sun did something different.) I suspect Apple's choice was more consistent with the crude image technology of the 1980s and IBM's choice was a better fit for what television used back then.

Whatever the original reason, we know IBM's choice won out. An image created in a Gamma 2.2 world will appear dim and "muddy" on a 1.8 display, conversely an image created on a PC will appear bright and garish on a Mac (people prefer bright and garish to muddy incidentally). This has nothing to do with the display being "brighter", it's the mismatch between the original "power function" and the rendering device "power function".

I'd wondered if Apple would take advantage of the Intel conversion to shift to a PC gamma, but I don't think they have. Much of the Apple UI looks a bit odd in a PC gamma, since it was designed for a Mac gamma.

I run my iMac monitor with a Gamma of 2.0. The OS X UI elements don't look too bad and, if I edit my images to be a bit "bright", my pictures seem acceptable on Mac and PC. It's an ugly compromise. The one thing I'd like to see in Vista would be for it to manage gamma translation in software, but I suspect that might be computationally tricky. (My OS X 10.5 wish list is another matter -- but Jobs never gives me what I ask for ...).

I would love to see WMP succeed -- if Microsoft were to make it an open standard. I would be shocked if they did that. I am pretty confident they will be evil. In their (weak) defense, I suspect they will be paying some patent holder licensing fees somehow.

I'd hoped for years that we'd go to JPEG 2000, but it has two fatal problems. The underlying mathematics are heavily patented (thanks to Wikipedia for finally answering my question of the past few years) and JPEG encoding on modern CPUs is both computationally expensive and energy inefficient. The patent problem has loomed larger thank to our governments idiotic management of the patent process. So JPEG 2000 appears to be a dead issue. (Adobe Acrobat, btw, provides JP2K encoding as an option, it works very well for text documents because it manages edges well even with significant lossy compression.)

[1] Even I know I'm oversimplifying here. I think to really understand what's going on you need a deep knowledge of the physics of the photo sensor and be able to map the transformed output of the sensor into the odd and archaic terminology of visual perception (read this). I wonder how many people really understand the end-to-end process. I'm guessing maybe five.

Update 5/30/06: So why don't we just update JPEG to fix its problems with 16 bit color and braindead metadata? Heck, I'd be delighted with 12 bits and Adobe XMP! I don't know. Really, it would be a huge improvement over what we have now, and really 99% JPEG with modern encoders is pretty darned good in terms of artifact and resolution. Sure the files could be smaller, but it would still a huge improvement over DNG and TIFF ... As a former manager once told me 'don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good...'

Nisus Writer Express: My Review

After much consideration, I bought Nisus Writer Express, now on version 2.6.1. Here's how a review of a much earlier version concluded:

ATPM 10.11 - Review: Nisus Writer Express 2.0:

Nisus Writer Express isn’t—yet—the power user’s word processor its namesake was. But it shows a high attention to detail in what really matters: the act of writing. And, more than any of the alternatives—Mellel, Mariner Write, Microsoft Word itself—it has a high quality of “Mac-ness.” Express just feels right in a way that no Mac word processor has to me since the venerable WriteNow. If you’re looking for a writer’s word processor from a responsive company, definitely take a look at Nisus Writer Express.

So why did I opt for NWE?

My requirements were:

1. It had to use an open file format. Practically that means RTF, RTFD or OpenOffice. I cannot abide yet another file format that will strand my data. That ruled out Mellel and, sadly, AbiWord. I don't care if it's the second coming of WordPerfect, it has a stupid proprietary file format. That also rules out Pages and AppleWorks.

2. It had to be a reasonably decent wordprocessor. That ruled out TextEdit. I thought TE might do, but I eventually realized it's a toy.

3. I wanted it to run on my old iBook well. That ruled out Pages.

4. I hate Word, despite being a certified Word guru. That ruled out Word. I have an XP version if I need it.

5. It had to be something my wife would be very comfortable using. That ruled out Word and Pages and OpenOffice and various GUI front ends on TeX engines.

6. It had to be able to save to an SMB share. That rules out TextEdit and a number of other OS X apps bitten by the SMB save bugs.

7. I really wanted a Cocoa app that would play well with OS X and support services. That ruled out OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc.

8. It had to be fast and reliable. That ruled out OpenOffice, AbiWord and a few others. I'm not sure NWE really qualifies but I'll find out.

9. It had to be able to open most Word documents so they can at least be read, and it should be able to save as a Word file tolerably well.

10. I would have loved lots of other wordprocessor features, things I remember from the Golden Age. I'd have liked outlining and hypertext and table of contents and more. Alas, this is not the Golden Age. So this is the least of my demands.

There was only one Mac wordprocessor left standing after I'd made my list -- Nisus Writer Express. So, even though I had qualms about their rigorous license enforcement and price, I bought it.

How's it stack up? I'll add comments here as I learn about them.

1. I encountered my first bug within 10 seconds of installation. If you are a non-admin user, you can't enter a license for the entire computer. The app gives an error message and continues, but the license isn't installed.

2. It does save to an SMB share. Many Mac apps have trouble with this. Stupid Apple bug, good work Nisus.

3. I have a family license. I installed on my iBook for all users. I had two user sessions run NWE. It didn't complain. So I seem to have a license for simultaneous use on 3 machines, and by a number of simultaneous users on each machine. In practice, it's very unlikely we'll have 3 simultaneous users so we're well within the official licensing rules.

4. It does outline style lists. True, they don't collapse (it's' not an outliner), but really I didn't expect that much. It would be marvelous if this turned out to be good WP, but they key test will be reliability.

5. It launches very quickly and is very responsive on my old G3 iBook.

6. It has styles! Unlike the butchered "styles" in Word they may even work.

7. It supports LinkBack, as does OmniGraffle (but, not OmniOutlinter - yet). So OG drawings can be embedded in NWE and edited. Interesting! I was one of the few people who liked Publish and Subscribe. BTW, OLE embedding in Word is worse than you could imagine.

"... In addition to these Services, Nisus Writer Express enables you to include content from other applications and then edit that content again with just a double-click (Classic users will remember Publish and Subscribe as well as Embedded Graphic Objects.)

The LinkBack Framework is an open framework that brings editable objects to Mac OS X. Using LinkBack-enabled applications, you can paste content created in other applications into a Nisus Writer Express document and later edit or update the content from the original application. When activated, content can be updated automatically by the provider application or the provider application can display the content for the user to edit. Any changes automatically replace the original embedded content."

8. This dictionary tip works in NWE! Very cool, if a bit weird. Mouse over a word, hit Cmd-Ctrl-D, a definition window appears. It don't think it works in every Cocoa app, but it does in NWE. (Maybe 10.4 required?)

9. I couldn't find out what file formats NWE imports. I thought for a while that the list was very short, but this web page has a longer list. So, really not too awful. Nisus does need to document this better, I couldn't find it in the help files or PDF documentation.

... Much more to come ...

Update 5/24/06

10. The Word import can't handle Word's change tracking feature. So if a Word document has had changes tracked, and the owner hasn't told Word to "accept all changes", it will be badly mangled when viewed in Nisus Writer Express. This is a tough test for Word document import; Nisus doesn't pass.

Update 1/7/07

11. The HTML export is text only. It's really inadequate and shouldn't be on the export list.
12. It can't auto-generate a table of contents based on the styles. A feature of WordPerfect (and Word) which I do miss.

FrameMaker vs. Pages

How does Pages compare to traditional desktop publishing solutions? FrameMaker Feature Comparison compares Pages, Word, FrameMaker and InDesign. The PDF is a long and comprehensive report.

I hope the author will update the document for Pages 2.0. I'm still on the fence about committing to Pages. For now OmniOutliner and AppleWorks and Text suffice. Since Pages will install for all users, and Nisus will only work for a single user per machine, Nisus is rather more expensive.

I'd feel better about buying Pages if Apple were more serious about building iWorks -- or if they switched to an OpenDoc file format.

Nisus Writer Express - a real alternative to Word on the Mac?

Nisus Writer Express Features

One feature caught my eye: "Inheritable Character, Paragraph, and Note Styles".

I like Pages and this sounds good too. So two Word alternatives. I want to test the two out with my wife.

Update 9/9: The main thing Emily needs is something that handles Word documents seamlessly. Pages doesn't do the trick because it translates first to pages, then you have to export. Too confusing. AbiWord is another option; it uses its own file format (which I hope/pray is the OpenOffice format) but if you open a Word document it saves and edits as Word.

I'm not sure what Nisus does here but I think Pages may not work for Emily.

Update 9/10/05: AbiWord worked pretty well, but I'm very impressed with Nisus writer. Default format is RTF, but if you open a Word document it saves it as word. Good trial policy but you can't print without a watermark on the last page. Nice outliner styles, even though it's not really an outliner. Much as a like much of Pages I don't like yet another file format. Apple hasn't made it an open spec as far as I know.

On reflection I'm thinking Nisus might be ahead of AbiWord. Interestingly the two share some code, I think they use the same open source code for word document management.

macosxhints - Pages 'First Look' preview and commentary

macosxhints - Pages 'First Look' preview online

Pages isn't ready. Neither, for that matter, is iLife '05.

...Pages truly has the ability to redefine what a word processor should be. Its seamless integration of page-layout and word processing features makes creating brochures, reports, flyers, and other well-designed documents a piece of cake. With literally no training, anyone can create professional looking output with a minimum of fuss.

Unfortunately, the lack of a page management system within Pages means that using the program is more frustrating and troublesome than it should be. In addition, the bugs in Find and Replace and PDF Export, along with the generally limited capabilities of the Export feature, make using Pages a bit frustrating. As good as all the other features are, these Version 1.0 bugs and missing features may make Pages unusable for many people. It’s a shame, too, because it’s a great program. Hopefully a version 1.1 update will address the general bugs and page management features.

The Mac OS X Hints comments affirm this MacWorld article, though some argue the Find/Replace behavior is a "unix" standard.

Apple pushed out too much stuff that wasn't ready to make their most recent marketing deadline. iPhoto 5 is not ready. Pages 1.0 is not ready. (I read that iPhoto 5 has a 25,000 image limit. Sigh. I hope Apple is working on a pro version.)

Not ready for use. I'll wait for Pages 2.0. Nisus Express is looking good by comparison.

iWork performance

Macintouch - iWork

'm not sure if this has been commented upon yet, but Pages is *slow*. Page redraws are glacial. Steve's presentation showed newsletter text reflowing around the cookie like water. On an iMac in the Tampa Apple Store, I opened that newsletter and text reflow was slow and jerky.

'Well,' I thought, 'It's an iMac,' and moved to a dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac. Barely any better. What was Steve using? Then I tried another template -- 'Club Newsletter'. Try this: Make a Club Newsletter. Drag the keys around. On my mom's 1.25 GHz iMac G4, text reflows/screen updates happen less than once a second.

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Reminescent of iLife. I'd like to know how Apple does its product development. Is it all outsourced? What is the quality of their "internal" non-OS development shop? Small vendors, like Nisus, OmniGroup and others do produce high performing OS X software. So we know it's possible, but that Apple can't do it.

Except with iTunes.

So who does iTunes development?