Nisus Blogs

A neat calligraphy video filmed live and sped up. The artist’s website also has some very impressive images of “light calligraphy“.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, but the whole “Social Networking” craze is now officially over. It died the day that Hoffspace was launched.

I already have some pretty severe back pains, but the idea of a David Hasselhoff social network is going to cause me more pain than any back spasm can give me.

A new month brings a new version of Nisus Writer Express.

Nisus Writer Express 3.1 brings the following new features:

• Go to page
• A large caret option
• Dutch and Polish localizations
• Page Borders palette
• The open dialog now has an “ignore rich text commands” option

There are also many bug fixes. You can read about all of the changes here.

Express 3.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or above.

You can download the new version from our Express download page.

This release is a free update to current license holders of Nisus Writer Express 3.x.

Now back to our cave to work on future versions. Or to sleep. Or both.

The title of this post comes from a song by The Blasters, later covered by X. Yes, I did listen to music in the 80s, as a matter of fact.

Anyway, it is the Fourth of July here in the States, so that means fireworks, marching bands, too much food, and in this case, a long weekend.

This means that we are taking a bit of time off. We won’t be around until Monday, 7 July. In the meantime, if you need support, please visit our forum or you can write to one of the mailing lists.

You can purchase as normal from the store, and orders will ship on the 7th.

To those here in the USA, have a happy, safe holiday!

I got this lovely warning today as Time Machine was backing up my iMac:

My drive isn’t that large (160 gig WD Passport) and I probably should get a larger drive. But, eventually Time Machine will eat that drive as well.

Maybe it is time to look for alternative backup solutions.

Here we see the boss inspecting the updated Nisus Writer Pro manuals.

He is a very tough editor. Nothing escapes his keen eyes.

I try not to link to things that have been linked everywhere, but this one is just too good to pass up.

In case you have not seen this, the Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop posted the full text of an email that Bill Gates wrote to Jim Allchin (then VP of the MS Platform Group, which was responsible for XP and Vista, and servers I believe) and others.

Seems Bill had a lot of trouble downloading MS Moviemaker from the Microsoft.com site and let loose on the folks responsible. Man, I would hate to be on the receiving end of this rant.

Here is the money quote: “What an absolute mess.”

OS X has a lot of issues, but after reading this, I am glad I primarily use Macs.

Whenever I pass through my local Cost Plus World Market, a place of wonderful things, I always take a walk through the candy aisle. Obviously we’re pocky fans around here, but I’ve always been more a gummy man myself. It might be my German heritage, but indeed Haribo macht mich froh.

So upon a recent visit a happy “oooh” (or perhaps OOo) was uttered when I beheld the king of gummy bears:

That greeting card is standard size mind you. Each bear packs in a whopping 105 grams of sugar- let the gummy feast begin!

Well, he isn’t actually local, but he did work here.

Charles Jolley, formerly of Nisus, creator of LinkBack, currently at SproutIt and Apple, is making a lot of news these days. He and the .Mac team have been pretty busy over the last 18 months or so, working on MobileMe, the .Mac replacement. They are using SproutCore, which is something Charles was working on before joining Apple. SproutCore is a javascript framework that allows you to build web apps with very little code.

Now that Charles has made the big time, I just wish he would pay me the money he owes me. I mean, I don’t think $1.63 is too much to ask for, you know?

Hey, what do you know? Snow Leopard is real! I had my doubts, but I was wrong. Happily so.

It’s too bad that Apple didn’t reveal much about 10.6 in the Jobs keynote. From the stuff that was revealed, though, I find the Exchange support to be the most interesting. Sounds like Apple is subtly going after the business, or Enterprise market. By supporting Exchange out of the box, you eliminate one huge barrier to using Macs at a large corporation.

Effectively, they are beating Microsoft over the head with their own tool.

Mind you, this is a company that has said repeatedly that it really isn’t interested in the Enterprise market. Right.

They have a funny way of showing their disinterest.

So here I was, trying to do something to heal the rift between Heidi and Lauren on The Hills. Suddenly, I realized it was almost time for WWDC.

Mind you, I wasn’t really that interested, since it seemed to me all of the chatter was about the iPhone. When people discussed the conference, all I could hear was “iPhone blah, blah, blah .Mac blah, blah, blah” and I quickly tuned out. That is, until I read about the supposed name of Mac OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard.

According to this article, Snow Leopard is an evolutionary update (hence the code name), with the focus being not on new features, but stability and reliability. And, it could be all Cocoa.

And, in the biggest news, 10.6 marks the end of PowerPC support. Which means that those machines would be stuck on 10.5 in perpetuity.

While I would love to believe this, I don’t know. Seems a bit soon to end support for PowerPC machines. Plus, all Cocoa I don’t see happening for a while, if at all.

I guess we will find out tomorrow, but this sure does make WWDC a lot more interesting, at least for me.

Happy days are here again! Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 is now out and about. Thank you to everyone who contributed bug reports, feedback, and rants during the public beta period.

You can download this new version from our Pro download page. You can read about all of the new features, fixes, enhancements, and localizations in the release notes.

The system requirements are Mac OS X 10.4 and above.

Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 is a free update for licensed users of previous versions of Nisus Writer Pro.

So head on over to the Pro page and download that update right now!

Apparently management thinks that I am slacking off. No one has told me this, no one has to. I can sense it. And before you accuse me of being paranoid, let me just say that I am paranoid.

Having said that, let me introduce you to my shadow. He is grey, with four legs and big eyes. He doesn’t talk much, he just watches me. He won’t even tell me his name! He just sits in the chair next to me, watching, waiting for me to make a mistake. He even sleeps with one eye open, just in case I fall asleep, or watch a movie, or play a game. I know he is filing reports to ownership … he is very sneaky, this one.

Well, he won’t catch me. I am working like I have never worked before: hard. This spy in the house of Nisus will not get the better of me. I won’t give him the satisfaction!

Now where is my Call of Duty DVD?

Hey, what do you know: the World Wide Web as we know it is fifteen years old.

Happy Birthday, WWW!

I can remember when we first saw an Intel-based iMac in the office. Our jaws dropped when we saw how fast the thing booted up. Here is a consumer iMac, parked right next to a dual G5, and it just left that machine in the dust.

It was at that point that we knew our PowerPC machines were not long for the office. This has come to pass, as we all use Intel Macs and the PowerPC Macs are used as test machines only.

But I wasn’t so sure that those newfangled Intel Macs were going to catch on. After all, up to that point, Intel was the enemy. It was almost traitorous to consider anything other than a PowerPC powered Mac, right?

Well, I was dead wrong. Apparently Mac aficionados have embraced Intel as their own. According to the stats provided by the Omnigroup, a whopping 83.5 percent of their customers are using Intel-based Macs.

Excluding the new Mac users, which seem to be coming over in droves (Thanks, Microsoft!), that seems to mean that many of you die hard Mac users have dropped your PowerPC machines for Intel Macs.

I knew that eventually people would switch, but I didn’t think it would be this fast.

See, this is why I don’t gamble.

Here at Nisus we spend an awful lot of time talking about Nisus Writer Pro. So much so that Nisus Writer Express has started to feel a bit neglected.

However, Tom Dillon of MacApper gives Express some much needed love.

In his review entitled “Nisus Writer Express: The BMW of Word Processors?” Tom says “In short, Nisus Writer Express is everything a word processor for Mac should be: a combination of utility and elegance that just works.”

Check out Express for yourself if you haven’t already.

The Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 Preview Release is now available for download.

New features include Comments, Mail Merge, Go To Page, Page Borders, and a Large Caret option. The Macro language has been updated, and bugs have been fixed.

Nisus Writer Pro is a Universal Binary and you need at least Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

You can download this release from our Pro Preview page.

Disclaimer: Please remember that this is beta software, and is still in development. Please take appropriate caution. Use copies of important documents, for example. Read the release notes before using the software.

We offer no formal technical support for beta software, but remember that you can ask questions in our beta forum.

Enjoy!

We have been working pretty hard since Macworld on the next release of Nisus Writer Pro: 1.1. This new version, which is free to current license holders of Pro, will offer several new features.

A highly requested feature for Pro is comments. Comments that are compatible with Word. We have accomplished that, and have included a few nice touches as well.

We have added a comment history, which is a really nice way of grouping together related comments. This feature makes it easier to read all of the comments, as they do not clutter up your document.

You can also collapse and expand comments, if you are into that kind of thing.

Lastly, comments are also customizable.

We have also added Mail Merge, another highly requested feature. Mail Merge is pretty straightforward, with one twist: You can add custom bits of perl code as a placeholder. This addition adds flexibility and makes it very customizable. You can also preview the final output.

There are other features, such as Go to Page, and the addition of a Large Caret option. A number of new additions to the macro language have been made. And many bugs are being squashed.

The system requirements have changed a bit. You now need at least Mac OS X 10.4, as Panther (Mac OS X 10.3.9) is no longer supported.

We hope to release this update before the end of the second quarter of this year. I hesitate to say that, however, as unforeseen things happen. Let’s just say that is what we are aiming for.

(Edited 11 April 2008 for clarity)

I like simple technology. That is to say, things that are simple to use, and not too overloaded with features I probably won’t use. I don’t care about how it works, I just want it to work for me. It is a big reason why I like the MacBook Air so much. Nothing I don’t need, just the basics. I own a bottom of the line MacBook because I don’t need a DVD burner, and an 80 gig drive is enough for me. Compared to the Air, the MacBook is a heavyweight.

So when I saw that Martha Stewart is now the proud owner of a MacBook Air, I have to say that I feel … conflicted.

On one hand, it is pretty cool that a high profile media mogul is a Mac owner. On the other hand … It just feels weird. I mean, it’s Martha Stewart! Like … ewww! It just feels so dirty!

I guess my MacBook isn’t so bad after all …

Many moons ago we sold a product called Kyoto Gardens. It came from our partner in Japan, Mercury Software. We sold many copies of this CD, and it was popular for quite a while. But, as OS X became the Mac OS of choice, sales dwindled to almost nothing. (By the way, we still have a sealed copy of this version. If someone wants an older version, please let me know.)

Fast forward a few years and in early January of this year I received a package from Mercury. There was an updated version of Kyoto Gardens that was native for OS X. We ordered a few and it sold out pretty quickly. We ordered twice as many the next time and they sold out.

So now I have a bunch of these in stock. The good news is that back in the OS 9 days we used to sell Kyoto Gardens for $40. This new version, which is a Universal Binary, sells for $25 plus shipping. It’s a pretty good deal, I think.

Anyway, if you would like to purchase this new version, you can do so from our store.

Now back to your regularly scheduled silliness.