Is Nisus Moribund?

[mountainman]

Is development really proceeding? So far all we've seen is a (much welcomed) maintenance upgrade, but we still have no clue as to the future of Nisus products, and Martin seems to be pretty busy. Sooner or later (the sooner the better) we need to know what's in the pipeline, if anything.

[betalogue]

Undoubtedly, it would be helpful if Nisus could be more forthcoming about the current situation. While the latest release was mostly a “maintenance” release indeed, it did include a new feature that I requested a while ago and that I am quite happy about (ability to switch back to older window style with separate title bar/toolbar). I take this as an encouraging sign.

[THDW]

My problem with the text to speech is pretty major. I cannot get Nisus to read aloud from the insertion point; Nisus goes back to the start of the document. I am surprised that I am not getting feedback from Nisus. I have posted here and I have written directly to Nisus support. Very frustrating. As a creative writer I find hearing my prose read back to me very useful. I am using the most recent Nisus and Sequoia.

T
Norwich

[phspaelti]

My problem with the text to speech is pretty major. I cannot get Nisus to read aloud from the insertion point; Nisus goes back to the start of the document.

Nisus does start text to speech from the beginning of the document and not from the insertion point. But I can get it to start anywhere in the document if I use a selection.

So here's a macro that will start speaking from the insertion point:

Start Speaking from Insertion Point.nwm

(5.6 KiB) Downloaded 228 times

[dharmanaut]

Is development really proceeding? So far all we've seen is a (much welcomed) maintenance upgrade, but we still have no clue as to the future of Nisus products, and Martin seems to be pretty busy. Sooner or later (the sooner the better) we need to know what's in the pipeline, if anything.

While I've been pleased with my quite limited use of Nisus Writer Pro (~1 year), I have been wondering precisely the same things: 1) Is the app simply so good that not much development is necessary, OR 2) is development moribund? With all the AI integration stuff screaming down the bobsled run, we need to know roughly what the company has in mind, or at least I'd like to better understand its approach/philosophy regarding such newfangled things. When the last blog post was a year ago, well, that's not particularly promising.

[betalogue]

I think it's pretty clear that NWP is not an app that is likely to readily jump on the latest tech bandwagon. NWP's feature set is pretty timeless and I wouldn't expect to see any AI features in it any time soon. As long as the developer(s?) continue fine-tuning the app, fixing bugs, maintaining compatibility with the latest OS and hardware, and adding the occasional new feature when appropriate, I am happy. If you need a quick AI fix, you might want to look elsewhere indeed.

[Amontillado]

Most of NWP is just what it needs to be. It would be nice to have page styles, though, so preparing a document for different audiences could include flipping header and footer styles, margins, etc.

[xiamenese]

Most of NWP is just what it needs to be. It would be nice to have page styles, though, so preparing a document for different audiences could include flipping header and footer styles, margins, etc.

I agree. There's not much that I feel is missing in NWP, but if page styles could be incorporated into the "Style collection" system, that would be a great enhancement in my view. Clearly .dot templates can be set up with those differences to cater for different target audiences, but as my workflow is to apply a style collection to a pre-written document using a macro, having page styles included would be a boon.


Mark

[THDW]

Philip

"Nisus does start text to speech from the beginning of the document and not from the insertion point. But I can get it to start anywhere in the document if I use a selection."

Thanks!
In the past I did a selection but lately I got into the habit of just asking the speech to start at the insertion point and it did. Or is my mind going? Perhaps Nisus was reading from text which I had selected earlier

I am now finding I can't get Nisus to count the words in a selection. Instead, it is giving me the total number of words in the document. Am I doing something wrong?

T

[adrian]

Dear Phspaelti

I too have written some macros in Nisus, which was fun, despite its rather unyieldy macro language.

There are still unaddressed questions in Nisus Pro, especially when it comes to copiously many footnotes (as an example in what should become a scholarly book or a PhD thesis), headers and footers in different sections, or formatting in various languages and alphabets (which continues to be pretty unstable, especially in tables); tables stretching beyond (soft) page borders results in formatting problems too.

Despite any eventual room for improvement, we have to get hold of Martin as a matter of utmost urgency first, to see what is the future of Nisus (including its demise or sale).
How do you think we can go about it?

All the best,
Adrian

My problem with the text to speech is pretty major. I cannot get Nisus to read aloud from the insertion point; Nisus goes back to the start of the document.

Nisus does start text to speech from the beginning of the document and not from the insertion point. But I can get it to start anywhere in the document if I use a selection.

So here's a macro that will start speaking from the insertion point:
Start Speaking from Insertion Point.nwm

[Þorvarður]

Hi Adrian,

There are still unaddressed questions in Nisus Pro, especially when it comes to copiously many footnotes (as an example in what should become a scholarly book or a PhD thesis)

Just curious, what problems are you having with footnotes in Nisus Writer Pro? And how many footnotes are we talking about?

formatting in various languages and alphabets (which continues to be pretty unstable, especially in tables)

Could you describe that in more detail? When you say 'unstable', does that mean Nisus crashes? And what languages and alphabets are involved?

[David Sharp]

Over six months since the question was first posed on this forum, the answer is clear: Yes: Nisus is moribund.

There's always the possibility that someone with the funds, the technical know-how and good intentions will emerge to take over and revive Nisus. That seems very unlikely to me, and it's definitely not a good idea to count on it.

Long story short: I'm working on the assumption that I need to find a replacement for the most important single piece of software I use every day.

It would also be wonderful if there was a place elsewhere on the web where we regular users could carry on exchanging tips and info, if only to facilitate a transition that's likely to take a while to complete.

As regards a replacement for NWP, usability and features will obviously be key criteria, but not the only ones. The fact that a software program is backed by a company of reasonable solidity, with more than just a single person replying to messages, will be another. For the latter reason, I'm tempted to switch to Apple's Pages, but others may have better suggestions.

Concerning an alternative to these forums, I regret that I lack the technical knowledge to be of any help in finding or creating one. But if anyone else is able to do so, please count me in. If you need to contact me, my personal website can be easily found by searching with "David Sharp Paris".

For other recent contributions on this issue, see the "Contingency" thread on the "Blank Page" forum—if you can manage to access it. The fact that it's taken me an age to post the present message, due to repeated connection failures, may well be yet another symptom of Nisus's decline.

I plan to also post a message on this subject on the Tidbits talk forum.

Best wishes to all. Nisus, it was great knowing you.

[joekissell]

Hi folks,

A bunch of people have been writing to me personally about Nisus Writer Pro and Nisus Software. Back in November 2024, Martin was chasing down a bug I reported, and we corresponded about it a bit. About a month ago, having not heard from him about it since then, I wrote to him again. It took a while for him to reply, but he told me he's now working at Apple and doesn't know anything about what's going on at the company.

So I wrote to my dear friend Mark Hurvitz, who worked at Nisus for many years and was pretty close to Jerzy. He and I chat regularly, and he's normally prompt in replying. So I asked him if he knew anything. A few weeks have gone by and he has not replied at all.

I then wrote directly to Jerzy, both by email and on LinkedIn. Again, it's been a couple of weeks with no reply whatsoever. His LinkedIn page makes it appear as though he's working on something else entirely.

I chatted about this with Adam Engst, and he checked in with Dave Larson, who hasn't worked at Nisus for I think five or six years. He didn't know anything either.

Ordinarily I'd say that the absence of information proves nothing, but, I mean, come on.

Nisus Writer Pro is 100% mission-critical for my business (Take Control Books). I use it every single day, and although I've spent many many hours researching potential alternatives, there simply isn't anything else that does what I need to do. I would be devastated to lose this app. But it certainly appears as though no one is working at Nisus Software anymore, and if I had to make an educated guess, I'd say Jerzy has given up on it. I would VERY much like to be proven wrong about that.

I know Nisus Software is still taking people's money. Someone wrote to me just today saying they'd purchased the app but then had trouble downloading it, though that eventually resolved itself. But I don't think any human beings are paying the slightest attention.

Over the years I've occasionally daydreamed about buying rights to the app myself, though at this point, I couldn't make a business case for injecting the kind of money into Nisus Writer that it would need to remain viable and maybe even regain a foothold. My personal feeling is that the honorable thing would be for Nisus Software, if there's anything left of it, to open-source Nisus Writer Pro and post a candid "Thanks, it was nice, but it's time to move on" message. I think we'd all respect that, and I'm sure someone would be interested in stepping in as a volunteer maintainer so the software can live on even if the company does not. I'd certainly be willing to help! But if no one even answers an email message, I expect we're all just going to wait until some macOS update kills it for good, and that will be that. What an inglorious end that would be.

Joe

[Þorvarður]

Hi Joe,
Thank you for your interesting post.

Do you think Martin would be willing to fix the forum software so that searching would be possible again? Or perhaps give you the passwords so that you might be able to do it?
The forum is a great treasure trove, and it's unfortunate not being able to search it anymore.

One user suggested to enter a search term plus "Nisus forum" into the web browser we are using. Unfortunately, with this method I have never managed to find what I'm looking for. Instead, I find a lot of pages where the search term doesn't even appear!

So regaining the forum search ability is a matter of the utmost importance for us all.

[betalogue]

It looks to me like the forum pages are indexed by Google, so you can always do a search this way. In Google, use

site:nisus.com/forum

followed by your search terms.