Nisus Writer Pro 1.2

Three years ago I wrote a review of Nisus Writer Express. I recently updated to last November's Nisus Writer Pro 1.2 so I figured I'd supplement my original review.

In general, I'm a contented user. I wish I could use it more, but most of my printed writing is done with Word on an XP box. I use it for limited writing on OS; I've never really given it an acid test.

Over the years I've had two medium and one big issue with Nisus.

The first medium issue is that earlier versions didn't manage Word .DOC images well. Nisus would open the document, but when it saved the documented the images were not compressed. In particular, Nisus did not implement even PNG compression. I don't know if this is still a problem, but I've never seen mention of a fix.

The second medium issue is that even at NW Pro 1.2 you still can't save in Open Document Format.

The major issue is that the 10.5 update broke Nisus Writer Express and Nisus didn't provide a free fix. NWE was the only significant Mac app I use that didn't work in 10.5. It smells like Nisus was doing something programmatically fishy, and so they ought to have provided a free patch.

On the other hand Nisus uses RTF as a native file format, so Nisus documents are more likely than any other word-processing format to be readable in 10-15 years. The Style implementation (Pro version) is simple and excellent (aside: spit upon the Beast), and now that moving Navigator/TOC entries moves document blocks is a very reasonable outliner as well. It's the closest thing to an integrated wordpressor/outliner I've seen since FullWrite Professional. (MORE, bless its heart, was fundamentally an outliner -- though it was a better word processor than most.)

One of the strengths of OS X is that we have choices about word processors. Microsoft Word of course, but also Pages, Nisus Writer (Express and Pro), Mellel, and about 3-4 others (honorable mention to MORE's reincarnation - OmniOutliner). Nisus Writer's RTF support, style sheets, performance, and outliner features mean it's worth a close look by anyone who can avoid Word.

Making sense of Google's user created "My Maps"

I've long been frustrated by the awkward design of Google's personalized May Maps. The service feels crude, and I'm unsure how long the data will stay around.

Today I decided to try and learn a bit more. I recommend the introductory video (a very young sounding narrator) and I really recommend "Browse the directory". Turns out that's not, as I'd imagined, a directory of maps (why should it be?). It's a directory of Map tools that make "My Maps" much more useful.

I'd like to see what I can do in terms of Minneapolis St Paul trails, and maybe get some use of the msptrails.org domain I registered a while back.

Update: Well, I gave it a good try, but it's still a toy. For example, there's no way to edit a map you've created; you can't revise or extend a line. I'll wait until Google puts a bit more energy into this one.

Migrating my MacBook to a 500 GB drive

I'll try to update this with a bit more detail later, but I want to write this minor post while the details are fresh.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro from a 120GB Fujitsu to a 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive (totally bare from Amazon, just the drive in a plain brown box). I followed the directions provide by Apple, this is not a hard procedure.

I bought the 5000 rpm drive because I mostly care about reliability, low vibration, low temperature, and capacity. From what I read in this older MacBook the 7200's effective performance boost is very small and some 7200 drives have quite a bit of vibration (seems idiosyncratic).

I won't repeat Apple's directions, except to say they left off one little bit. I think this set of directions is more complete.

Briefly then ...

1. I considered creating a disk image clone on my PPC iMac then using firewire disk mode on the MacBook to clone the image over. Andrew, who is generally reliable, warned me of some issues related to using a PPC to clone an Intel Mac drive (endian?).  I had a very cheap 2.5" USB enclosure I'd used with a 80GB drive; it worked perfectly well with the 500 GB drive. I did discover that Intel and PPC Macs use different partitions for their boot drive. Intel Macs default to GUID partitions, PPC default "Apple partitions". So maybe that's the difference Andrew warned of. I did all the partitioning and cloning from my MacBook.
2. I used Bombich Software: Carbon Copy Cloner [1] to clone from my MacBook. It took about 2-3 hours; it would have gone faster if I'd remembered turn off spotlight when cloning.
3. Apple's directions omit one key step and tool. You need a T8 Torx driver to remove the metal shell that's wrapped around the disk. Maybe if you buy the replacement drive from Apple it comes with the shell? Anyway, if you have a Torx driver it's an easy task, but if you don't you're stuck.
4. Apple's not kidding about the metallic foam shield that's glued on the RAM cover you remove. It's not easy to get the shield back on, you need a non-magnetic plastic card to push it down so you can get the metal band back into place.

The first boot seemed to take an eternity. It was much longer than usual. I think the systems was adjusting to the new drive. Once it started it rebuilt some caches then completed. I almost gave up -- so be patient.

So far so good. The drive is quieter than the original Fujitsu and it feels more responsive (could be imagination, it's a 5,000 not a 7,200. I might put the original in my mother's Mac Mini, though if I'm going to bother with that hard to service job I might as well buy another 500 GB drive.

Now I can carry more media around, and I can play with more virtual machines...

[1] CCC is free and comes from a trusted developer. It now incorporates ads. Since users spend a lot of time checking up on the CCC process this is a fantastic ad platform. I donated $10 via the web site. I rarely use CCC, so I try to make a donation each time it works for me.

The Newton lives in the iPhone's CPU

Not exactly news, but still worth noting. The Newton's CPU lives on in the iPhone ...

AppleInsider | A closer look at iPhone 3G S Cortex-A8 ARM and PowerVR chips 

... The Cortex-A8 class is referred to in general terms as ARMv7, not to be confused with ARM7, which was actually a third generation ARMv3 used in the Apple eMate300 a decade ago. Previous generations of iPhone and iPod touch used an ARM11 processor, part of the ARMv6 generation.

Apple partnered with its British equivalent Acorn in the late 80s to adapt Acorn's RISC processor for use in mobile devices, forming the ARM partnership. Apple subsequently used a third generation ARM6 in its first Newton MessagePad in the early 90s...

Experiment with VMWare -- for free

I have sinned, but I have seen the light.

Now that I've joined the Church of the disposable image, I need to catch up on some basics. I've been using Fusion and Parallels w/ Windows 2000 on OS X, but the Windows VM world is new to me. So I'll have a few posts on that topic.

Since I've committed to Fusion on the Mac I'm experimenting with VMWare. Their primary end user product is VMWare Workstation, which is inexpensive for academics. This appears to be similar to Fusion on OS X. There's a generous 1 month free trial.

The surprise, however, is that you don't actually need to pay any money at all to do quite a bit with VMs. Both VMWare Converter and VMWare Player are free. VMWare Converter (Windows) will convert an existing machine, such as an XP machine, to the VM format and VMWare Player will execute these images. [Update: OK, not quite! See below.]

This isn't something VMWare markets. VMWare's web site doesn't list VMWare Converter as a possible source for VMWare Player images and even the VMWare Player wikipedia article doesn't mention this.

VMPlayer (Windows) will run their "appliances". -- and more besides ...

... Open Microsoft virtual machines, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly called Live State Recovery) images, Norton Ghost 10 images, Norton Save & Restore images, StorageCraft ShadowProtect images, and Acronis True Image images. In this process, the initial virtual machine or image is left untouched in its native format and any modifications are saved in a much smaller VMware-formatted file that is linked to the initial image...

So you can turn your existing Windows environment into a VM and play with it - for free. I think you can also run a VMWare 6.5.2 VM on Fusion but I'm not sure of that.

There are a few VMWare Player limitations, it doesn't enter full screen on startup unless you tweak a setting and it's essentially undocumented. I've also run into device driver issues, I can't see how to install the VMWare tools for example. It's really a bit of a toy but it's free. There's an upgrade mechanism to VMWare Workstation

If you want to download the Win 7 RC .iso file and turn it into a VM without installing it I think you'll need VMWare Workstation -- though if you have VMWare Fusion maybe you could prep it on the Mac then move it to VMWare Player.

VMware Converter comes with lots of documentation. Cough. Actually, it appears to be about as undocumented as VMWare Player. Must be a corporate policy.

I think there are two ways to run Converter - standalone and client server. I did the standalone conversion. I installed it on a machine and directed it to send the resulting image to a network share.

I clicked "convert machine" and followed the defaults. The one place to pay attention is where you're asked to select the target VMWare product. The default is some corporate product, you need to change to "VMWare Workstation 6.5.x".

A reasonably big VM takes rather a while to convert - overnight is typical.

More later...

Update: Ok, now I see the catch. Unless you install VMWare Tools you can sort of use the VMWare Convert image, but you can't go full screen, toggle out of it, some drivers don't work, etc. You can get VMWare Tools from VMWare Workstation, but there's probably a reason VMWare doesn't bundle them with Player. I say "probably" because I think VMWare is rather vague about the whole think. In any case I'll be using Workstation for my further experiments. (You might be able to install VMWare tools via Fusion. I think this is actually legal, since the point of VMWare Player is that it lets you use completed images and if you have a license to Fusion you can can complete them there.)

Update 1/21/2010: I experimented for a while, but I found VMWare on XP much less consumer-friendly than VMWare on OS X. In retrospect that's not too surprising. VMWare/Win is a corporate product, VMWare Fusion (OS X) is a consumer/geek product.

A sislaw’s Pre review

Sislaw Nettie (sister to sislaw Martha and to Emily) has a Pre.

I trust her reviews far more than the pro reviews – am I the only one to notice that Amazon’s product reviews are much better than those printed in magazines?

Like me Nettie misses Graffiti One. She likes her Pre a lot, but unsurprisingly the battery is troublesome. iPhone users can feel smug about the Sprint crapware infesting the Pre. NASCAR … brrrrrrr

My Little Pre « Nettie’s World

…I can’t delete the Sprint NASCAR app – other posters on the Pre forums yesterday confirmed this. RI-DI-CU-LOUS. So now I need to see if there’s any possibility of hiding it, although the thing I object to most strenuously is the fact that it’s taking up my 8GB space in the first place, of course.

6. Battery life. It wasn’t a very promising feeling when I woke up on Sunday morning. The battery had been at nearly 100% when I turned out the light (I had spent 10-15 minutes cleaning up contacts -more about that later) and all apps were closed. When I picked it up to say “Good morning dear Pre” the battery was at 65%! For 7 hours of (nothing?) — all I could think was that the WiFi connection was what was dragging it. The Pre forums also complained about poor battery life – and some constructive posters also provided tips, a few of which I’ve put into practice like dimming the screen a bit, syncing email a bit less frequently, turning off IM and WiFi when not needed. I think I also have to do more reading on better management of lithium ion batteries in general – a few posters said things like, “It typically takes a new battery a week of so to condition itself for maximum results” — is that really true…

No, I don’t think the “week or so” story is true – more like wishful thinking. Maybe Jobs was right about the battery cost of multitasking, though I could believe the Pre OS might be more energy efficient than OS X.

Nettie, if it makes you feel better my iPhone battery will run out by day’s end if I talk more than about two hours during the day (it’s almost a year old now). In airport mode it will last a few days even if I use WiFi occasionally.

Condolences on the Sprint crapware Nettie. Apple was in a stronger bargaining position with AT&T, though I’ve hear rumors AT&T has been fighting mightily to put their garbage on the iPhone. Rumor has it Jobs arose from his sick bed to smite them (ok, I made that up).

VMware academic discounts: Fusion and Windows Workstation

Post-Waterloo I'm a VM geek.

So, as a part-time faculty person at the U of MN I was pleased to see that VMware has large academic discounts.

VMWare Workstation is $114 academic ($190 list), Fusion (Mac - I use this) is $40 academic ($80 list).