The screenshots were informative. My guess is that there may be a conflict between Little Snitch and NetBarrier.
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Yes, I have Intego’s Net Barrier. I have just turned it off. Hopefully that will resolve the issue. I’ll let you know how it goes. Thank you!
Doesn’t Net Barrier have the same functionality as Little Snitch? Specifically, can’t you configure Net Barrier to block Nisus Writer from communicating with the Nisus servers?
I’ve been trying Pages as an alternative, and it’s a disappoint. It seems to always start in its native format, which is not good for something that I use for note-taking because many things can’t open it. Another problem is spellchecking. It’s primary mode is Autocorrection, which corrects as you type without any notice, which I consider not acceptable because easily mangle names or words without you noticing it (a potential disaster if you’re writing something important). Turn off Auto-Correction and you get a quite limited spellchecker that I cannot get to accept my changes permanently. Maybe I’m missing something, but it does not look good to me.
If you are primarily interested in note-taking, have you tried TextEdit or Bear?
Thanks, but I didn’t mean that kind of note-taking, more a simple word processor like Nisus Express. Pages is close, but its spell-checking is problematical. I want something less complex than Word.
I hesitate to suggest it but Scrivener is really, really good. It’s been in continuous development for over twenty years. Professional novelists, screen writers, technical writers are enthusiastic users. The reason why I hesitate is because, on first sight, it is wildly complex and people are overwhelmed by the complexity. But it can be used very simply (you just ignore all the other stuff). The overall goal is to facilitate writing and eliminate distractions and if you just use the basics it does just that but backs up the simplicity with the fancy stuff if you need it. What trips people up on first use is they expect it to function like Word. It doesn’t. It wants you to write and the formatting, fonts, etc. are handled later in the compile stage (they provide compiling templates for standard things so you don’t really need to think about that unless you’re starting on a 500-page opus that you’re sending direct-to-print). The introductory tutorial is excellent, BTW.
You get a 30-day (non-consecutive) free trial. Might be worth your while to poke around.
Dave
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I hope the app is better than the website. I had to disable all my ad blocking, and Stop the Madness, just to get the store to open. I wanted to go to the Store because there’s no Pricing page. When I tried to read their “How does our Licensing work” page, it hung Safari. Trying to download the trial resulted in:
It might be wonderful software, but my first impressions aren’t good, and poor websites from developers don’t inspire confidence. I’d genuinely like to try it, but right now I have no option but to pass.
Works fine for me and I have Stop the Madness and an ad blocker running.
Dave
Scrivener is terrific. We do our first drafts of all our scripts there. A bit of a learning curve at the start for sure but an excellent tool.
That sounds promising to me. Generally I prefer to write first and worry about the formatting and fonts later – although things like writing fractions may require some formatting). Scrivener sounds like it’s designed for people writing for publishers who have their own preferred formatting. Word is designed for people who are delivering a finished product (such as a letter or a report) to non-publishers.
It’s sort of more complicated and the opposite of this generalization, at least in certain domains of writing and publishing. As an academic writer, I often need to take care in the formatting at the start – in my particular field, that includes tables, complex interlinear transcriptions, figures with multiple panels, tracking and auto-numbering references to tables, figures, and examples, working with my reference manager, and more. I need to submit manuscripts to publishers with formatting so that reviewers can clearly see what I am presenting. I tried Scrivener at one point. It just was not workable for this kind of writing.
True, the publishers have their own styles. I have to follow each publisher’s style guide for how to format citations in text and in the reference section, use of footnotes, writing style for figure captions, etc.The typical request is to submit to these publishers in Word format. Upon acceptance, after review, the manuscript is sent to their production department, where they use their own fonts, styles, etc.
I hate Word, and I don’t use it. This means I write in my preferred tool, which at one point was Nisus, and then Mellel, which is what I use now. I then convert to Word, double check that everything migrated correctly, and submit in Word. This is for major scholarly publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Elsevier, etc.
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This is peculiar, isn’t it?
Why on earth are academics spending vast quantities of time doing typesetting? Shouldn’t they be thinking about, I don’t know, ion transport instead of which font to use for the quote?
I am dumbfounded by the huge interest in arcane typesetting and book production software by academics and others. Why are you doing this? That’s not your job! Yes, it’s wonderful fun to write arcane codes that produce elegant books but that’s not your job!
Well, it is your job, now, because nobody’s willing to pay up for good editors and typesetters who will do a splendid job of producing your work for an audience. It’s weird. This whole thing started when word-processing became easy enough that secretaries were no longer needed (grim business communication has been the result) and now specialists are having to learn publishing arcana in order to be published.
Not sure this is a good use of time.
Dave
Well research has to be presented and how it is presented is a key part of providing a trusted level playing field for peers in that field. Most academics are not picking fonts, rather they’re following guidelines on what is widely deemed a default presentation.
Scrivener does a good job of aiding that.
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It’s an interesting topic. On the one hand, I’m just barely old enough to have been present to watch the transition from watching Vice Presidents shift from formulating presentation ideas on a yellow note pad, discussing them with a staff member, and letting the staff member run off and make slide…to watching Vice Presidents hunched over their keyboards, wrestling with building their own PowerPoint presentations. All these years later, I’m not sure that has been the win it was supposed to be.
On the other hand, academics have been using TeX to typeset equations for almost fifty years and using reference managers to format footnotes and citations for nearly as long, and I am one of them. Or at least I was.
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Yes, absolutely! Modern software is wonderful for that.
And yet, somewhere around here I have a meteorological journal from the early 50s with one of my father’s papers in it that consisted of stat camera reproductions of the typewritten manuscripts with handwritten equations and hand drawn graphics. Seemed to work for them…
Dave
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Agreed. One of my consulting gigs in the early 90s was converting the slide production service at Argonne national labs to desktop tools. The existing system was really elegant but they were excited about how quickly things could be produced with the new desktop publishing systems.
Dave
Word, like everything else Microsoft makes, is bloated and makes it very hard for one to make the program work the way I want it to, while Nisus is filled with options that make it easy. Also, because of visual difficulties, even using Apple’s Accessibility program, I find it hard to accomplish what I wish to accomplish with Word. I used to use it all the time but that was before it became so complicated. It is just a personal issue for me.
I’m not sure it is that specific in what it blocks. I will check that out with Intego, a really valuable program. On the good side I am expecting a brand new iMac which might make it easier to install Little Snitch when I get it. This iMac has had so many problems that Apple has once again recommended I get to the Genius Bar to solve software issues. Time for the new one lol. Thanks for your suggestion.
As a (retired) meteorologist this interests me. Maybe I have read that paper!