On 2005 Sep 10, at 7:13 am, Robert B. Waltz wrote:
What follows is going to sound very negative. I don't really mean it
that way. It's an overly negative reaction to an overly positive
reaction to my post. But I stand by the points; it's just that it
lacks what there is of good to be said for NWEx.
I would argue strongly that there really isn't room in the Mac
market for Yet Another Low End Word Processor. AppleWorks is a
poor program, but lots of people use it. (I live in Minnesota,
the most Mac-heavy state in the U. S. -- 20% of computers here
are Macs -- and I get more AppleWorks documents than Word documents
from Mac users.) The ones who find it unsatisfactory, almost
without exception, move to Word. Based on my experience, the only
slot available for NisusWriter is as an alternative to Word,
*not* as an alternative to AppleWorks.
_________________________
I don't see it as negative, but as a meaningful critique.
True, we don't want to be unduly negative and demeaning to good work
or insufficiency of such, but I for one didn't take your comments to
be negative in that way. The fact that so many hang on hope and
still express hopes, disappointments, and requests ought to be seen
as powerful testimony that Nisus is a solidly respected program that
yet has much to deliver.
I was shocked/saddened to read of Charles Jolley's departure. I was
amazed and pleased at his openness with us with so much detail. I
don't know how many people could do that and work besides. Whether
its bad for Nisus or not, I know not. Life goes on. I do prefer
hearing the real news, even if not rosy. However, I understand its
perilous to let it all hang out, as recently demonstrated. Strong
specific statements can backfire as though they were under contract.
It takes an unusually strong person to let the criticism roll off,
and an unusually good user base to not pay too much attention to the
unduly negative. As for me, I love to know in a succinct way, what
challenges the programmers have and choices being made, and
ESPECIALLY the commitments of directions and priorities. But I
realize most can't work with this many "bosses".
However, it does little good for us to sit and read various users or
hope-to-be users tout whether Nisus X is the real thing, or if it is
not intended to be a replacement for Nisus Classic, or if it just is
not there yet. I do so need to know the up-to-date intent and
commitment of Nisus at the official level. If I'm not in the target
market, we're all better off knowing it clearly at the earliest
possible point. I still perceive/hope Nisus plans to make NWX a
replacement for Classic, and even better. Sure, nobody planned for
it to take so long to get there. But the real
As for NWX, I want very much to love it. I'm painfully switching to
OS X, and must still rely on Nisus Classic for any serious word work,
but I avoid it very much because of the various pains of Classic,
crashes (especially), and simply switching gears etc. I have been
procrastinating too long deciding what will replace Nisus Classic, as
eventually something will. I can't continue this way forever. If I
have to buy and learn a separate macro program to customize
Appleworks or iPages, so be it-- I won't switch to M$ Word. (I'd
just use TextEdit first, and bitch that after all these years Apple
is too stupid to show non-printing characters, and non-contiguous
selection doesn't register for formatting etc.)
Personally, I can't justify Nisus X until it can be my main word
machine, and can't commit to Nisus for my main machine until it can
handle graphics beyond the level of TextEdit, and the macro
capabilities take a big jump in capability for personal control, and
a bit more reasonably open Nisus Classic documents. meanwhile I'm in
a quandry mucking about with a distressing hodge-podge, trying to
"thing differently" wondering why I should have to! Yes, there's
lots to like about OS X, but I'm getting too old to like change, when
the blessings seem so illusive!
I very much miss the capability of Nisus Classic macro to select a
sentence at a time, read it (TTS) and then move to the next sentence,
continuing until I interrupted it (with a less than desired method--
deselect the text). So near as I can tell, this is not currently
possible with NWX, nor any current product. I had high hopes for
Tiger's "Voice-Over", but experience has been very disappointing.
So, I manually select and press a key to read. Not nice for long
sessions, where I need to pause and see where its reading!!!
But I can't go back either. I think I'm still glad I switched from
Word to Nisus in 2000. I just wish I could know what I will/would be
glad I did five years from now. Life just gets complicateder and
complicateder! :-)
Ben Andrus
Still in Montana
_______________________________________________
Nisus-interactive-nisus.com mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.nisus.com/listinfo.cgi/nisus-interactive-nisus.com
