Nisus Writer, originally Nisus, is a word processing program for the Apple Macintosh. At the present time (December 2007) it is available in two varieties: Nisus Writer Express, and Nisus Writer Pro. The program is valued by its users — especially serious users like book authors — for its reliability and unique features. It has been criticized because of its rather unorthodox interpretation of Apple's user interface guidelines.
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History
Nisus Writer was the first word processor for Macintosh — long before Unicode was introduced — which was able to handle multiple type systems within one document, e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, etc., thanks to WorldScript. Therefore Nisus Writer was an indispensable tool for people who had to integrate passages written in non-Roman script into a regular document, for instance theologians and archaeologists. Other distinguishing features of the program were non-contiguous text selection, multiple clipboards, one of the earliest implementations of multiple undo, voice recording, and so on. A unique feature of the Nisus file format was that the font and formatting information was saved in the file's resource fork, with the data fork containing only plain text. Thus, if the file were to be opened on a Windows PC the text would be readable (although style information would be lost). This predates cross platform file formats for word processors like Microsoft Word. Contemporary editions of Word had different formats between the Mac and PC versions and required a translator if the file were to be readable at all. Using the resource fork to store style information was later duplicated by Apple for the standard Macintosh styled text format as used in SimpleText. Nisus Writer 6.5 is the last classic version of Nisus, which can still be purchased. It runs under Mac OS 9.2.2 and PowerPC based Mac OS X, but only in the Classic environment. Nisus developed a fundamentally new product for Mac OS X: Nisus Writer Express (see below). It is based on Cocoa and complies with Apple's user interface guidelines. Nisus Writer Express is a compact word processor with good Microsoft Word compatibility. It was originally developed as Okito Composer by Charles Jolley of Sprout Systems. Nisus bought Okito Composer and hired Charles as Managing Director where he oversaw further development of the word processor he had created. Nisus Compact was an extra-lean word processor, which was especially designed for Apple's 68K PowerBooks. It was designed to fit entirely within RAM to avoid accessing the hard disk on a battery-powered system. It was at first a commercial product but was later given away with various books and magazines as part of a marketing campaign.
Current product range
As of December 2007, Nisus currently sell two versions of its word processor: Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Writer Pro. Both versions come with more than adequate functionality for most users, although Pro leans more towards business documents, and is designed as a replacement for the likes of Microsoft Word for Macintosh.
Controversy over upgrade fees
Nisus usually releases updates free of charge, but broke with this policy in late 2007 by charging a US$30 upgrade fee for Nisus Express 3.0, if upgrading from any previous version. This alienated many dedicated users[1], some of who had been active providing bug reports that were incorporated into the new version. Additionally, the last full release of Nisus Express — 2.7 — is not compatible with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). This means those wanting to continue using a previously purchased Nisus Express license after upgrading to OS 10.5 have no choice but to pay the upgrade fee[2].
