nisus.com

Ah, I see the problem:

NWX does fine creating lists WITHIN table cells, but won't create a list across row or column boundaries --i.e. won't number rows automatically. Word does this and it would be a handy feature.

[/quote]

Problem with beta 8. With nothing selected, pressing Command-C (copy) resets previous pasteboard contents to null.

Example: Select some text and press Command-C, now paste it (Command-V), now with nothing selected press Command-C again, and finally press Command-V. Duh! Nothing gets pasted.

Thanks Cletus, I'll see that the bug is fixed for the next beta.

Example: Select some text and press Command-C, now paste it (Command-V), now with nothing selected press Command-C again, and finally press Command-V. Duh! Nothing gets pasted.

Huh? To me, this seems a quite "normal" behavior. I mean - if you select "nothing" and copy it, of course "nothing" will be pasted. Other example: If you'd transfer $0.0 from your bank account to another one, exactly that amount of "money" would show up as transferred from your account as well as transferred to the other account.
But why do such a thing in the first place? Or what am I getting wrong here?

ninjagame

ninjagame,

this "don't copy nothing" feature works great for me, I will copy text

say:
target="_blank"

that I want to add to a line in html (several times)

so I would go cmd-V, cmd-V

but once I accidently hit cmd-C, now I really don't want to copy nothing, I just wanted to paste and am hoping that cmd-V still works for

target="_blank"

does that explain it

the point is you don't do it on purpose, it is a mistake that you didn't want to make

does that explain it

the point is you don't do it on purpose, it is a mistake that you didn't want to make

Yes, that explains it, gemboy.
What caused my confusion might have been that I didn't realize that the second "Cmd-C" operation described by Cletus was accidentially.
Otherwise, this would be exactly the behavior I'd expect from a Copy&Paste function in a program. Let's say you want to Copy&Paste the sequence "abc" first, the sequence "def" next, "ghi" then and so on. In this case you'd expect that when you select "abc" and apply "Cmd-C" for the first time, the program would put the sequence "abc" into some kind of clipboard or cache; when you press "Cmd-V", the sequence is supposed be pasted to the place you want it to be. But then - when you go on and select "def" and then apply the "Cmd-C" command, this time you'd expect the program to "copy" the sequence "def" to the clipboard or cache and subsequently paste the sequence "def" - and definitly NOT the sequence "abc" again.
Now, as far as I understand programming, for a program "nothing" is just another kind of "something", i.e. something with the content of, well, "*nothing*". So, how is the program supposed to "understand" that if you "select" a different content for the second time in one case (the "*nothing*" situation) it is expected to retain the previous content (i.e. "abc"), in the other case (the "def" situation) it is expected to overwrite the previous content (i.e. "abc") with some new one (i.e. "def")?
In my case, the "copy nothing" feature works great for me. In the novel I'm currently writing I sometimes hit the "Space" key between two words twice instead of once (or maybe I hit the key too hard and my keyboard interprets this as two hits), and from time to time it's very comfortable to execute a "Find&Replace" in which I replace "two Space" by "one Space", in other words: the surplus Space by "nothing".

from time to time, I have wondered it cmd-c of nothing wasn't the right thing for a program to do, but I don't know if I would ever want nothing in my copy cache.

I think once I wanted the three pages of text not to be sucking up memory, or maybe if I copied a password...but since I am the only one who uses my computer, I don't worry about people taking my password from that means.

and since I accidently hit cmd-c about once a day, it makes sense for me to not lose what I have because of that accident

Every Mac program I've ever used leaves the clipboard unmodified if you attempt to copy nothing. That is, a Copy command is ignored if nothing is selected.

ninjagame wrote:Huh? To me, this seems a quite "normal" behavior. I mean - if you select "nothing" and copy it, of course "nothing" will be pasted.

Heh. No, it's not a normal behavior, because this is inconsistent with how every single app behaves. The power of Mac OS X and its applications is consistency. As soon as an app behaves differently from how you expect it to behave, it gets ditched by its users.

To take a proper logical approach to your example: How about if you can't select "nothing"?

But we digress. It is a bug.

Another important aspect of a good application design according to Apple Human Interface Guidelines (and common sense) is forgiveness. I.e. the app should forgive the user as many mistakes as possible (such as hitting Command-C instead of Command-V).

For more info, check this page: http://developer.apple.com/documentatio ... ion_5.html

Read the whole document. It's a fascinating read (not just for programmers).

Beta number 9 is all ready for download. Among the changes is a new Full Screen editing mode.

Beta 9 is nice, and the fact that fullscreen support was added is a demonstration of how the folks at Nisus listen to their customers, so hats off for that.

Nevertheless, I remain quite sceptical about the fullscreen mode, but that might just be related to my system configuration. I'm on a Powerbook G4 15" screen with a resolution of 1280*854. My default font is Times New Roman, 12pt, and in draft view (the view I work in most of the time), I have set the zoom to 150% because it's so much easier on the eyes. In page view, it's set to 125%, so I can still read the text, but I can focus more on the page itself in WYSIWYG-mode (as I said, I normally use draft view, so I don't spend much time reading text in page view). Given all that, I doubt that I'll be using fullscreen view that often, if at all: on a 15" screen with a relatively high resolution, a regular font size is simply way too small, and only masochists or genetically enhanced people would actually put up with it for a longer period. The concept behind the fullscreen view is nice, it allows you to work on your document without being distracted, but I'd really, really like to see some kind of zoom slider that would allow me to actually see my text. I can see how the current implementation would work well on a 12" screen with a resolution of 1024*768, but for anything higher than that, the user is practically forced to use an entirely different font size to see what's on screen, and I don't think a simple view should actually do that to a user.

Another criticism that is related to the popularity of widescreen Macs: I find it hard to read text that stretches all the way across a widescreen display. True, a zoom slider would actually remedy this by displaying "less" text, but still, a widescreen display makes you move your eyes more than the 12" screens available on Powerbooks and iBooks. It would be great, I think, to have the text, in fullscreen, centred with definable left and right margins. That way, you'd not only be able to focus on your wordprocessing, but you'd have less physical work to do when reading the text you're writing.

Now these are just personal suggestions, I do not claim that I'm representing every single user on this planet. Still, I'd be curious to know what other users think of the current fullscreen view implementation.

I was not clamoring for full-screen mode, so perhaps I should hold my tongue, but mrennie expresses my concern as well. I think his suggestions are helpful.

An additional solution to the width-of-line problem might be to allow text to flow in columns in full-screen mode.

Perhaps these options could find a home in the Appearance preference pane.

--Craig

Perhaps it needs to be made more accessible, but you can adjust the zoom in Full Screen mode using keyboard shortcuts (eg: the default is Command "+" and "-"). I think one good change would be for the zoom setting on Full Screen to default to the Draft view setting.

I think it is cmd = to make it bigger and cmd- for smaller

martin wrote:Perhaps it needs to be made more accessible, but you can adjust the zoom in Full Screen mode using keyboard shortcuts (eg: the default is Command "+" and "-"). I think one good change would be for the zoom setting on Full Screen to default to the Draft view setting.

Oh, indeed! I obviously had not realised that; thanks, it's definitely much better now! And yes, I think defaulting to the draft view zoom would really be a good idea.