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

[James kilfeder]

Hmm. I only heard about it comparatively recently. I may have the 
all-new cocoa one.

Inspired by your note, I've looked at it again. My reservations are 
that it's hard to expand things so that you can see them big, but 
most importantly of all, I can't import from and export to Word, and 
keep the different styles. That's really important to me, and 
Writenow can do it.
In a way, Writenow is a simpler, faster Word5, without all the guff. 
Infinitely smaller and faster. there's almost nothing in it that I 
don't use. So for someone who's writing long, long screeds of text, 
like, say, a novel, it's great.

But I was intrigued by your description, and have read a bit (I've 
had to waste part of today working) of The Nisus Way.

It is, of course, changing my mind. But in a way it shows that Nisus 
is the opposite. It can do all sorts of things that I rarely want to 
do. I love that bit about how certain facilities are there because 
you need them in Japanes or Arabic, but they don't tell you that.

Anyway, I've found this thread really interesting, and it's changed 
the way I think about WP applications. Thanks to everyone.

Kilfeder


>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
>
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