[DuoList] testing/Non-PPC word processor/spreadsheet

[Nick Lowe]

Takes all sorts! I'm still blown away by Nisus (the old one, not the 
all-new Cocoa one, good though that is), but never really took to 
WriteNow, though I had a colleague who lived for it. It's probably 
people valuing different things with their WPs - the three best 
things about Nisus aren't so much the bread-and-butter writing tools 
(where people are probably fairly sensitive to nuances of interface 
&c., and I'm sure WriteNow scores high) as the stupendous 
Find/Replace and macro capabilities, the separate graphics layer, and 
the text-based file format (for HTML work). My eyes were opened less 
by the software itself than by Joe Kissell's superb book The Nisus 
Way, which is simply the best computer book I've ever read and is now 
up on his website at http://alt.cc/tnw.

That said, I still live day-to-day in Word 5.1. Who'd have thought in 
1991 that we were living in a golden age of word processing software 
and would never see anything quite as good again? Ditto MIDI 
software, come to that - another great use for Duos.

Nick.

>  > Without wanting to start a row on a NG that I'm new to, I'm puzzled
>>  by this praise for Nisus. I have it, I've tried it, but I've never
>>  liked it. I can't see why someone who writes would prefer it to
>>  WriteNow. I write for a living, and the fact that I'm using an
>>  application that's over ten years old is very odd, but there we are.
>
>I love Write Now. I wish they'd have kept it up. I never liked Nisus either
>but that's why we have choices ... :)
>
>Donna