Snow Leopard and Nisus Writer Pro

I am sitting in my office eagerly awaiting delivery of my copy of Snow Leopard. I am most excited about trying Exchange in the newish OS, but I have been a little trepidatious about conflicts. There is a site, http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/, that offers a rundown of known conflicts. This morning I received the newsletter from Nisus with the content below. If you are a user of their fantastic NWP please read and be sure to download their beta.

Nisus Writer Pro 1.3.1 contains no new features, but includes fixes since Pro 1.3 was released, and the aforementioned Snow Leopard fixes. The release notes for Pro 1.3.1 can be found on the Pro 1.3.1 download page.

Nisus Writer Express 3.3.1 is a feature release. The new features include an all new document manager, a style library, the ability to attach the active document to a new email message (in Mail.app and Entourage only), a selection history (allowing users to jump to prior editing locations), an option to automatically capitalize the first word of each sentence during typing (this is disabled by default).

There are also many, many fixes (including the fixes for 10.6), all of which can be read about on the Express 3.3.1 release notes page.

Both applications are Universal Binaries and require at least Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

Please remember that these are beta versions, and not available for purchase. We will send out an announcement when we release the final versions of both applications.

In the meantime, if you have installed 10.6 and are just dying to get back to work, download Express or Pro (or both!) and, well, get to work!

Tips and Tricks
Snow Leopard Tips

Mac OS X 10.6 brings a great deal of refinement, stability, and goodwill since the price is so low. However, we have discovered a couple of interesting issues that we should talk about.

The native file format in both Nisus Writer Express and Pro is RTF (rich text format). This format is shared by many other applications, including TextEdit and Apple Mail. It has been this way since the inception of OS X. We chose this format because it is supported by just about any word processor out there. Prior to Snow Leopard, files that were created in Nisus Writer Express or Pro would always reopen in the originating application.

However, Apple has changed this behavior in 10.6. All RTF files, regardless of where they were created, will open in a single application. By default the Finder is configured to use TextEdit. Obviously, this is not good for our users and us. It will be confusing and upsetting, and frankly we aren’t very happy about it. However, this behavior can be changed in a few easy steps.

1. In the Finder, single click a Nisus Writer RTF file.
2. Choose the menu File > Get Info.
3. Under “Open with” choose Nisus Writer.
4. Click the “Change All” button.
5. All RTF files will now be opened by Nisus Writer.

The other issue is more straightforward. Rosetta, the technology that was introduced with the introduction of Intel Macs to translate PowerPC applications on the fly, does not come installed by default. This is a potential issue because the file translators we use to open .doc documents, for example, are coded for PowerPC. When you try to open a document that needs the file translator you may see an alert that will ask you to install Rosetta. If you click the “Install” button, Rosetta will then install and Nisus Writer (Express or Pro) will work as before.

Or, to avoid that alert, when you are installing Snow Leopard for the first time click on the “Customize” button and choose Rosetta.