One year ago Joe Kissell reported on the unfortunate limbo state of Nisus Writer and Nisus Writer Express word processors. The subset of users who have relied on Nisus Writer for decades, particularly for its ability with double-byte code necessary for Chinese/Japanese/Korean bilingual documents (I translate Chinese Buddhist texts into English) are staring at the possibility of the next MacOS update breaking Nisus’s code. Has there been any news about the wish to either make Nisus Writer open source or perform the necessary surgery under the hood to make the software compatible with the new Apple hardware?
Mellel does double-byte code and I own it; I could dedicate a computer to never updating beyond Tahoe System 26+ but I would prefer to use a writing tool that is neither unfamiliar nor mothballed.
Maybe someone will take on the challenge of using A.I. to develop a clone. As discussed in another thread, the process has begun with many Adobe and Microsoft apps.
I don’t shed any tears for Adobe or Microsoft, whose behavior toward consumers certainly can feel abusive, but I’d much rather see Nisus Software find a way back to fully supporting its products than be faced with clones. On the other hand, if the Nisus apps truly have become abandonware, maybe cloning is a legitimate option.
There is no news, unfortunately. Second-hand reports suggest someone claims to be working on something, but I know no specifics. If I were a betting person, I would wager that zero humans are working for Nisus Software right now, that no one has touched or looked at the code in nearly two years, and that the app will be left to fade away. I hope I’m wrong! But things are starting to break in Golden Gate, the company has made NO public statements, and the last update was in the Sequoia era. Sooner or later, it becomes unreasonable to expect something different to occur.
I have visited the site periodically over the last few months looking for any news. Most days, it was impossible to get through, presumably because of the bot traffic. A few days ago, I was able to visit the site – and observe that someone had apparently renewed the domain. Today, after some delay, I was again able to get through. So there is some slight activity there, I think, but the key word is “slight.” There is no hint of the product being either updated or sold to someone else.
For some of us, Mellel is simply not an answer. It has neither macros nor the ability to save a series of regular expressions. I’m converting some of my NWP macros to BBEdit text factories, but text factories can’t do styled text. There is no substitute for NWP! But that doesn’t mean it will survive. I fear Joe Kissell is right.
I wonder if the minor fiddling around with the Nisus site might be someone looking to see if anything is salvageable or could be sold. I don’t know enough about software or AI to know to how easy it would be to updating Nisus’s code to run on current and future Macs, but I remember how long it took to revive Quicken 2007.
This would probably be even harder than Quicken. In the case of Quicken, there were still programmers around who understood the code. Not with NisusWriter; the (genius) programmer who apparently made it what it was has gone to Apple. I suspect that you are right that anything that is being done is in hopes of salvaging something, but I doubt it can be salvaged.
Turning the code over to an AI to keep it running for a few years might be possible, but actually changing the code in serious ways would be very hard.
I was and still am a Quicken user, and it took about a decade to get a usable upgrade from Quicken 2007 and the final upgrade lost all but a year of my investment records, so the upgrade was far from perfect from my view. So I would expect any AI upgrade also would be far from perfect.
If it’s true that someone who once contributed to Nisus code is now at Apple, is it reasonable to expect some Nisus features will begin to appear in Apple Pages?
I’m not at Apple to know the answer, but I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath. For starters, individual programmers don’t decide what features go into Apple products; that is decided from somewhere on high. And, even more to the point, it’s not particularly easy to move a feature from one code base to another, particularly when you don’t own the code!
Maybe Martin could convince someone at Apple to buy NisusWriter and revive let him revive it, but NisusWriter doesn’t strike me as a very Apple-like product. The only thing in their stable that qualifies as really high-end is FileMaker. Which they seem to be doing their best to make unusable for ordinary developers (tripling the price while taking away the key feature for programmers!).
I don’t blame Martin for going to Apple; he worked extraordinarily hard for Nisus Software, for not much return. And he’s a nice guy, from what I can tell; he deserves success. But I think NisusWriter was dead from the moment he quit.
Ideas may come from anyone, high or low. But it will require a management decision for the idea to make its way into a shipping product.
So, if Martin is working on Apple’s office software, he may be integrating some of his ideas as a pet project, and may be discussing them with his management, but he certainly won’t be the one who decides if that work makes its way into an actual release.
At this point I can visualize freezing in time a laptop dedicated to Nisus only word processing and never upgrading the system software beyond MacOS Tahoe 26++
The trauma of abandoning or attempting to translate 30 years worth of bilingual documents would be daunting indeed.
No bug that I reported in the Q2007 conversion was fixed. And when macOS dropped 32-bit software support, Quicken had to resort to running the conversion in a cloud virtual machine. This leads me to believe that the Quicken team did not receive the source for the Quicken migration utility from Intuit. So any bugs in the reading of the old data file were out of the control of the new Quicken team.
It wouldn’t surprise me. Right now Quicken is importing two copies of each transactions from of my credit cards. This has been going on for more than a month now, and I can’t be certain whether problem is really Quicken, the Credit Union, or Master Card.
There is a simpler possibility, and that is that the old Quicken code was written using development tools that didn’t survive – i.e. Carbon rather than Cocoa. Carbon was based on C, and was strongly C-dependent, and it was discontinued. Carbon apps no long run. Cocoa was the way to develop “new” Mac OS apps, and it was the path forward for OS X – but it basically meant trashing all your old code.
A lot of apps died because Apple hates backward compatibility and didn’t provide any real tools for Carbon-to-Cocoa conversion, plus they discontinued Carbon. The only option was to rewrite from scratch – and in a completely new development environment. Which is hard. Back in the day, I had the knowledge to write in Carbon. That was basically no help for developing in Objective-C and Cocoa.
To bring this back to the subject of NisusWriter, the conversion cost NisusWriter dearly. They made the (correct) choice to rebuild in Cocoa, which is why NisusWriter is still mostly functional today, but learning how to write in Cocoa took ages. The products were slow to market, and it really hit their (never large) market share.
I have found this old thread after trouble purchasing a license for Nisus InfoClick. The money was taken and I received an acknowledgement email with no license number but quoting an error and telling me to contact Customer Support. Emails to Customer Support are being rejected by the recipient and emails to Sales and Technical Support are not being replied to.
I have found someone in another forum to whom the same thing happened in May and August.
Seems shocking that a big name can behave like this without an outcry.