Is Nisus Moribund?

[betalogue]

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.

A very sad situation indeed. In my case, with a job that forces me to use Microsoft Word, NWP has been a sanity preserver, enabling me, in many cases, to avoid Word until the very end of the process. If NWP ceases to function, then I will be forced to fall back on using Word full time, which is a depressing prospect.

Disappointing to hear that Nisus is still taking people's money without offering any support or even basic information. At the very least they should provide more transparency about where they're at at this point.

[Amontillado]

Somebody fixed something in this forum. It's also possible that automated maintenance pulled the discussions back from the abyss. It loads quickly, once again.

All the best to whatever is left of the Nisus team. I hope personal tragedy isn't behind its denouement.

[joekissell]

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?

Martin doesn’t work for Nisus anymore, so I presume he no longer has access to the forum backend. But even if he did, I think it would be ethically suspect to go messing with your former employer’s site, regardless of the reason. And entrusting someone else with the password would absolutely cross a line.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be very happy to fix the forum if Nisus gave me access and permission, but it would have to be aboveboard.

[Þorvarður]

use
site:nisus.com/forum
followed by your search terms.

Yes, this helps. Thanks for the tip.

[Þorvarður]

I think it would be ethically suspect to go messing with your former employer’s site, regardless of the reason.

Isn't that exaggerating things a bit when calling it "messing with the site" because repairing the search and bringing the site back to what it was originally supposed to be can only be in everybody's interest, also in Nisus' own interest. You also said yourself that you don't believe any human being is paying the slightest attention.

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

After even your friend Mark Hurvitz suddenly stops answering, the case becomes mysterious. Perhaps something has happened to Jerzy. Maybe he is dead or seriously ill and not able to follow what's going on at the company. I'm just speculating.

His wife, Jolanta Lewak, is the company's CFO. Her email address is
jolanta@lewak.com

Has anyone tried to contact her?

[Tacitus]

Many thanks to Joe for taking the trouble to try and contact the various people involved with Niisus.

Sadly it looks as though Nisus is dead or at least living on borrowed time.

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.

To be honest if whoever owns Nisus has no intention of standing behind the product, there is at least an argument they are taking money under false pretences. Given the US fondness for litigation it makes me wonder if someone will end up suing them. Now that really would be an ignominious end...

For me it's the macro language that makes Nisus what it is. Word has Visual Basic which would probably be able to substitute, but I dislike paying the Microsoft tax. Mellel is really a writing environment rather than a word processor, but if Eyal Redler added a macro language I would have to go for that.

I agree with Joe. It would be honourable to open source the code with a note to say "thanks to all our supporters, but time moves on". I think most people here would accept that.

[David Sharp]

I agree with Joe that it wouldn't be ethical to intervene in the administration of a site without the owners‘ permission.

But I agree even more strongly with Tacitus that the fundamental ethical problem here is the behaviour of Nisus's owner, or owners. Somebody is presumably banking the funds that new purchasers are continuing to pay, despite the fact that such sales are implicitly fraudulent.

In these circumstances I think it would be good if this problem could become better known.

[Tacitus]

But I agree even more strongly with Tacitus that the fundamental ethical problem here is the behaviour of Nisus's owner, or owners. Somebody is presumably banking the funds that new purchasers are continuing to pay, despite the fact that such sales are implicitly fraudulent.

To be fair we don't know what is happening behind the scenes, so it may be premature to suggest they are trading unethically. Whilst we have every reason to think Nisus is dead since there is little sign of life anywhere, it may be there are ongoing discussions on a sale or other plans to attract new investment.

Don't forget this has happened before at the time of the OSX transition when there was a deal between Nisus and the owner of Okito composer. Nisus future was very much in doubt but that set them on a new path. OK circumstances were different, OSX was a new platform and Nisus had every chance of succeeding since it had (and still has) a loyal customer base.

Somebody must be paying the bills for the server on which this forum is located together with the nisus.com registration.

What does get me though is that even someone like Joe, a well respected figure in the community, for many years, has been unable to obtain even the courtesy of a reply from those who at one time were running the company.

[dgbchr]

Mellel is really a writing environment rather than a word processor

I'm curious how you distinguish between these two types of tools? You mention that macros are important to you ... so is that the feature which you consider makes a tool a "word processor" rather than a "writing environment"? What important things would you not be able to do in Mellel, without a macro language? (Apologies if this is an obvious question, or if you've answered it elsewhere ... the search feature, as you know, is not working so well in these forums right now!)

I came to Nisus after having used Mellel for several years, and would be content to return to Mellel if Nisus were to stop working. But I imagine that my use of these apps is pretty different from yours ... perhaps a "writing environment" is good enough for me! Hence why I asked the question above.

I truly hope Nisus comes back to life somehow. It has been wonderful having so many great options for writing on the Mac.

[Tacitus]

I'm curious how you distinguish between these two types of tools?

I refer specifically to Mellel and Nisus.

I think it depends on your use case, much of mine is long form writing. To my mind Mellel is designed for you to start in Mellel and use that to outline, write and complete your project; you start with Mellel and end with Mellel. Many people find this fine for academic work especially if you're using Right to Left languages. Arguably Nisus is aimed at the same use case, but the macro language enables you to manipulate search and replace, formatting and global character changes to a much greater degree than with Mellel. In addition, I've never really got on with the Mellel interface, but that's a personal thing.

Recently I've been doing my long form writing in Scrivener which is a completely different tool to either Mellel or Nisus. Together with Bookends (another venerable Mac app) for citations, and using Nisus for final text manipulation and correction of any glitches, these offer the most comprehensive set of tools for academic writing on either Mac or Windows. YMMV of course. From that you'll gather that the macro language is key, although Nisus itself is an excellent substitute for Word for straightforward letters/short reports etc. At a push I suppose Word with Visual Basic would do much the same but I object to paying the Microsoft tax.

More often than not, publishers will ask for submissions in Word. Depending on the content this often requires a check in the Windows version to ensure things are as they should be. No problem since I had to use Windows at work. and Nisus default format is .rtf as is that of Scrivener. I suppose at some point MS will abandon .rtf and use docx exclusively, but that's for the future.

[Þorvarður]

What important things would you not be able to do in Mellel, without a macro language?

Think about what macros do. When answering this question, it's helpful to distinguish between two types of macros:

[1] Those who simply execute a sequence of menu commands, one after the other, with lightening speed. This saves times, and best of all is: everybody can write such macros; no familiarity with computer programming is needed.
[2] And macros that use commands which are different from normal menu commands. In NWP, both types can be used in one and the same macro.

An example of the first type: Select all footnotes, copy them, create a new document and paste the footnotes into the new document for easy editing, and change the font and font size from Helvetica 10 to Times 12. All this could be done manually in Mellel, but it would be time consuming. (I'm ignoring the fact that in Mellel you can't even select more than one footnote at a time because Mellel doesn't have non-contiguous selection.) Or think of all the conversion macros: convert comments to footnotes, footnotes to comments, Fahrenheit to Celcius, etc. etc.

An example of the second type would be the macro "Compare Documents". This macro compares the two frontmost documents and produces a new document showing the differences using various formatting cues. Mellel can't do that.

To see more examples of the second type, go to the Nisus Writer Pro Macros forum. There are countless tips and tricks archived there which enable you to perform tasks that you could never do in Mellel.

Mellel is also not scriptable. It can't exchange data with other programs via AppleScript. — If you use Nisus, you can export data from a database, have Nisus open the exported text file in Finder automatically and then edit and format it with a macro, all in one go. I have found this extremely useful.

[dgbchr]

Thank you both for your kind and thorough replies! Happily the forum is currently loading well enough for me to browse the Macros section and understand better the power of these, and the tragedy that would be the loss of Nisus Writer Pro.

(I use apps like Keyboard Maestro, and understand how useful macros can be generally. But I left my PhD program before starting the dissertation, and so never worked on text longer than a seminar paper. Otherwise I might have experienced the value of macros for the actual processing of words.)

Hope I did not derail this topic too much. To bring it back to the question at hand, I will pass on that Mark Bernstein (developer of Tinderbox) recently wrote on the TB forum that he'll get in touch with Martin from Nisus. From the above discussion I see that others have tried this already ... but maybe Mark will have better luck.

[Amontillado]

Mellel should support Apple script and macros.

I've found Mellel very adequate for what I do and it's under active development.

The upcoming focus mode, for example, is supposed to work a little like Scrivener. Click on a heading (Auto-Title, in Mellel speak) in the navigation pane (called the Outline) and you see just that subdivision of the document.

It also handles large documents very well. I once generated four million word of lorem ipsum. My 2015 iMac scrolled smoothly from beginning to end. I put a unique word in the middle of the document, rebooted to clear any caching, and Mellel found the word without any visible delay. It might as well have been a search in a 200 word document. Four million words is roughly three volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

I can see the difference in printed output. Nisus uses the Apple engines, Mellel does not, at least from what I hear. The differences are subtle and Nisus documents look fine. Mellel's output is better, but it takes a side by side comparison to see.

Mellel's document format is very easy to figure out. I've started a Python library for document manipulation. So far, I've done two things with it. I wrote my own mail merge, another Nisus feature Mellel lacks, and I wrote a style reporter.

Mellel has a safety feature that can be confusing. If you delete styles from a global style set that you were using in an existing document, it doesn't goof up the document. Instead, the deleted global style becomes a local style, denoted with a diamond. You can saw off the limb you're sitting on without anything bad happening.

Finding where a document-local style is referenced can be time consuming. The quickest is to open the document with BBEdit, which works fine, and search for document id's. I thought I'd get fancy and generate a nice Markdown report of style usage. It works great. I haven't needed it since the situation I wrote it for, but I've got it.

The next version of Mellel is said to have a style analyzer built in, so my script will be obsolete - and fine by me.

I wish there was either closure or a rejuvenation for Nisus.

[tedg]

I earlier posted some qualms about NWP. But let me say that I use it every day for my most important work. It gives me joy, literal joy.

I suggested a subscription to make the business case feasible and found myself attacked. I value what it is. I'd like better styles, but will likely continue to use it until the paradigm changes or it breaks.