Nisus Writer Express

Guest · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 2:17 pm Post subject: Nisus Writer Express

I just saw the Nisus website (http://www.nisus.com/) and took a close look at their Nisus Writer Express page. Two ideas resulted from this:

1 - They have a great GUI and some compelling features. We should always be on the lookout for great non-MS software from which to derive inspiration and ideas. Nisus Writer has some things to teach us!

2 - We should encourage them, and all the smaller word processors and office programs (Mariner Write, Appleworks) to support reading and writing the OpenOffice.org file formats. In the best scenario, they would even adopt the OOo formats as their native filetype. In the global computing ecosystem, it's even more important that the OOo file formats become standard than that OOo itself does.

nedrichards · Agent Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 18

Aren't Nisus using a command line version of Cocoa AbiWord to do their fiel conversion (or have I gone mad) if so thry should pick up OOo compatability if and when it's integrated into Abi.

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 11:38 pm Post subject: (waiting for compilers)

I definitely think you're dead-on about looking for other non-MS software for inspiration. Along similar lines, I think we should also pursue looking at dead software...

Does anyone else here remember FullWrite? I think it had some wonderful concepts in it as well (aside from its sidebars, best at the time). I lovingly used FullWrite 2.0 until my hacked system could no longer deal with it. One of the best features with it, I think was its mode of viewing documents continuously with 'special characters' in a small column at the edge for page layout changes, ruler changes, graphics insertions, floating frames, etc. and editing them was as easy as double-clicking and, voila. Hehe...anyone know anyone who may still have the source code for it? Akimbo Systems seems to have gone under...pity. It'd be cool to port it to Carbon.

On a similar note, Word 5.1 (though MSFT) could also be a nice source of inspiration for alternative word processing interfaces. In comparison to OOo and future Word versions it was stripped down, but it actually had one of the most beloved interfaces of any program I know of. Just enough was accessible in toolbars and rulers, and most of the dialogs and menu structure made sense too.

There's lots of inspiration and lots of possibilities. We can't let anyone hinder them. Definitely think about the user interface of what would be your "perfect office suite". Hell, even Keynote frustrates the hell out of me (I look more to MORE...).

My biggest beef with OOo is that it's just another "me-too" Win32 Office clone interface with all the weaknesses thereof (damn way too many toolbars...to do anything useful I frequently need to flip through 2-3 alternative toolbars!). That's gotta go.

There's no one single best answer, and my vision is that we can provide entire pluggable "user experiences" for an office suite. But of course the default should still be the best one available...and be free software to boot Twisted Evil

ed

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

Not to post an completely biased opinion

but this is a completely biased opinion.

Thanks to College, i was a PC user until two years ago. In that time i used WordPerfect. And i have to agree with the 'perfect' tag.

the biggest thing that WP had that i have yet to see as well developed is the 'show all codes' part. Unlike Word where meaningless symbols appear on the screeen, a separate screen opened with html like open and close tags for all the formatting, which you could then delete. So why does this paragraph not indent? why does this sentance insist on being bold? the answers were always easy to find in WP.

not to meantion it had tabbed veiwing of documents. and the icon looked cool.

i'm sure there are more reasons, but as i can't use WP anymore, i'm trying to fight off the nostalgia.

-j

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 1:59 pm Post subject:

I do concur the show all codes was a cool feature. I used WordPerfect Mac 2 extensively, and 3 on and off. I don't recall ever seeing the tabbed browsing in the Mac versions, however, and haven't used the PC versions.

One fun thing to note is that you can still download WordPerfect Mac Smile

http://acmfiles.csusb.edu/corel/wpmac.html

It only runs in classic, of course, but is still nice to look at another design approach. When Novell redid 3.5 (before the corel rebranding) it really started to get a little toolbar happy, but the switching of toolbars was interesting as it had controls for hiding/showing all the ruler based ones so it was clear what was applicable. Feels better then the toolbar switching triangle OOo uses Smile

ed

JKT · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 8:45 am Post subject:

Speaking of inspiration for GUI design, how about OmniGraffle 3 (Pro)? Personally, the thing I loathe most about current word processors is the limitations imposed by the toolbar/palette mix approach which always leaves your screen either too crowded or not showing enough of the tools available. Although OG doesn't exactly do away with this, the implementation is leagues ahead of anything else IMO. It works very well for those of us with limited screen space but, at the same time, a need for easy access to as many of the available tools as possible. It is also exceedingly flexible as to how, what and where palettes are available.

IIRC, the framework for it is open for use by other software developers too.

Guest

JKT · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:01 am Post subject:

I honestly doubt that OmniGroup has either the people to spare or the time to help out - I believe that they have less than 20 developers working for them. It's often been asked of them if they had any interest in developing an OmniOffice suite, but Wil Shipley replies that it is too crowded a space for them to enter and would require far more manpower than they have to make it worthwhile.

If there is any interest in using OmniGraffle's palettes, the place to ask is the OG mailing list.