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.

Blogger success: Safari is a better client than Firefox

Blogger has reached a new level today. Safari is a better client that Firefox! How did they do that? They so bunged up the Firefox rich text editor that it's safer to edit raw html in Safari.

I swear the Blogger team must work for Microsoft.

Aperture Disaster: Gruber's take

Gruber is a deity among Apple bloggers. He's tackled the Aperture disaster. Basically, he agrees with my prior post.

Aperture 1.0 was a true disaster; he adds that it was 9 months late. Aperture 1.1 is a good improvement. Steve Jobs is committed to Aperture. If Apple buys Adobe Lightroom would go, not Aperture.

Bottom line, the shakeup is a good thing and Aperture was not designed to be awful. I'm looking forward to 1.11.

The Aperture disaster: is it about buying Adobe?

Cringely has another explanation for the rumored termination of the Aperture team:

PBS | I, Cringely . April 27, 2006 - Killer Apps

.... There's only one way to make that happen for sure, and that's for Apple to buy Adobe.

Apple has the stock, they have the cash -- such a purchase would effectively cost Apple nothing, the market would like it so well. The Feds would allow it because this current bunch of Feds allows just about anything (just look at Oracle). Efficiencies would abound. For example, Adobe's Premiere editing program could go away in favor of Final Cut Pro. Apple's Aperture photo touch-up program could die so PhotoShop could reign supreme.

Hey, could that be why Apple is rumored to have this week just laid-off its entire Aperture development group?

Could be.

I like Cringely, thought lately I think he's getting a bit wilder. This seems plausible, except Aperture really is pretty good. It would make more sense to keep Aperture and extend it with Photoshop capabilities and the Photoshop plug-in architecture. They'd kill Lightroom though.

The Apple Aperture Disaster

This is very good news. I'd come to decide that Aperture's performance issues and bugginess reflected advanced decay at Apple and a cynical ploy to force customers to buy new machines quickly. I was shocked, for example, that Aperture 1.01 couldn't import iPhoto 6.02 data. The performance problems seemed fundamental.

This claim that the real cause is a disastrous engineering/management failure is encouraging. This also explains the recent price drop.

Think Secret - Aperture future in question as Apple axes bulk of team

Apple recently asked the engineering team behind its Aperture photo editing and management software to leave, Think Secret has learned. The move, which resulted in the departure of several engineers while others were transferred to different projects inside Apple, raises questions about the future of Aperture, Apple's most heavily criticized and bug-ridden software release in recent years.
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Sources familiar with Apple's professional software strategy said they were not surprised by the move, describing Aperture's development as a "mess" and the worst they had witnessed at Apple.

Aperture's problems stem not from any particular area that can be easily remedied but rather from the application's entire underlying architecture. In the run-up to Aperture's November release last year, for example, sources report that responsibility for the application's image processing pipeline was taken away from the Aperture team and given to the Shake and Motion team "to fix as best they can." Some of those enhancements emerged in the recently released Aperture 1.1 update, which saw its release delayed for about two weeks as a result of the extra work needed to bring it up to spec.

In tandem with the 1.1 update, Apple dropped Aperture's price tag from $499 to $299 and offered owners of version 1.0 a $200 coupon for the Apple Store. Industry watchers and users alike have viewed the price cut as a maneuver to stave off competition from Adobe's forthcoming LightRoom software, a beta of which is available for Mac OS X users, and see the Apple Store coupon as a concession for early adopters who collectively appear to have been expecting more from Apple.

Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards.

Now that the news is out I hope Apple will make some kind of a statement. They ought to apologize to all the Apple Discussion posters who've had their complaints deleted ... Apple needs to set out a path of both incremental bug and performance fixes and architectural revisions.

Outlook Current View display bug: finally found a workaround

Maybe this will help someone, it's an exotic Outlook 2003 bug.

I make heavy use of Outlook's 'Views' to change how data is presented to me and I create my own custom views. This is particularly important for tasks. A couple of months ago Outlook stopped showing me the list of views -- I could only see a single view choice in the Advanced Toolbar Current View drop down list, or in the 'View:Arrange by:Current view" menu drop down. It always showed the current view. To change views I had to bring up the View edit menu and apply from there.

I thought this bug was related to our ancient corporate exchange server, but an upgrade to the latest version didn't fix it. It only happened with the Tasks stored on the exchange server, not archived tasks stored in my PST files.

The fix was, of course, to delete every custom view I ever created and reset every Outlook view to its defaults. Now the drop down works again. It's not that hard for me to recreate was was lost, so this is a big improvement.

gCal, iCal, iPod, Palm phone: Geek joy

It seems there are a few ways to have the OS X iCal app subscribe to items entered on Google calendar: HOWTO: Subscribe to a Google Calendar using iCal - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

The items on iCal sync to the iPod via iTunes, and to our Samsung Palm phones using MissingSync (and thus to my wife's future Treo p700). Assuming we do data entry via gCal (google calendar -- since email carries much calendar info, users of gmail get rapid data entry to gCal) to our family calendar, this has some interesting options.

It appears one can do private sharing of a calendar:

What's a "Private Address"?

A "Private Address" lets you easily view a read-only version of your calendar from other applications. Using this address, you can access your calendar from various applications, such as a feed reader (like Google Reader) or a product that supports the iCal format (like iCal for Mac).

To obtain your calendar's private address, just click on the "XML" or "ICAL" icon. A pop-up window with your calendar's private URL will appear.

Additionally, you can export your calendar information by clicking on the "ICAL" button and clicking on the displayed URL.

Note: The private address was designed for your use only, so be sure not to share this address with others. If you want to let others view your calendar, you can share your calendar's public address (or "Calendar Address") with them. If you accidentally share your calendar's private address, click on the "Reset Private URLs" link to regenerate your calendar's private addres

My geek radar is tingling. Look at how Google is managing creating merged views of calendars, the notification functions including notify to cell phone, the variety of subscription options, the search and private integration .... This could be the best webapp thingie since ... Gmail. It almost makes me forgive Google for their Blogger atrocity.

If Palm had half a brain they'd jump on this like berserkers, but of course that company zombied a long time ago. This must be painful for Apple to watch, they almost had it with .Mac (dotMac) but they lost focus and got greedy.