First Look: Nisus Writer Express 2.0. Write Now With Class.

Besides email and browsers, word processors are next in line for the requirement to have a comfort zone. Whatever we write with has to “feel” right. If you’re a Mac user for any length of time, you know the major players. Microsoft’s Word (part of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X), and the venerable AppleWorks (included free in the non “Power” Macs.

To be fair, AppleWorks does much more than words. Layout, spreadsheet, database, graphics, and more. Still, most users use AppleWorks to write. The same holds true with Microsoft Office. Word is the premiere application for most users and gets the most use.

Both applications are mature, well known, get the job done and are as different as night and day.

Word is expensive and has nearly every feature a writer could think of. AppleWorks is (mostly) free and has features most writers would never need.

What’s in the middle? Plenty.

At the top of the stack is an old favorite from Mac OS 9 days—Nisus Writer.

Nisus Writer for Mac Classic (still available) was loved by many and had almost a cult following. It was fast, efficient, designed for writers and word processors (not the same) with enough features to make most writers happy and not so many that you’d lose precious time figuring out how to use them.

Then along came Mac OS X and word processor developers had to move their Classic applications to the new environment. Nisus Writer Express 1.x had some problems making the transition. Much of that can be attributed to the near impossibility of taking the old and making it new and work well in Mac OS X. Nobody did that too well.

Still, what’s important is progress, improvement, and paying attention to the customer base. Nisus Software appears to have worked hard on all three.

The result? Nisus Writer Express 2.0

For the sake of brevity, I have to compare the new Nisus Writer Express with something. It’s not AppleWorks, or Word. Frankly, it’s not much like the dozen or so other word processors and text editors for the Mac. So, let me take a moment and go back about 20 years.

One of the early Mac word processors was a package called WriteNow. Small, fast, efficient, and with a Mac “feel” that was so popular among users that many swore they’d never use anything else. WriteNow made it to Steve Job’s NeXT system in the 80s as one of few word processors on the precursor to Mac OS X.

Nisus Writer Express (NWX2) can be compared favorably to WriteNow.

First, NWX2 is a massive enhancement over versions 1.x. So much so that it doesn’t feel much the same, only it feels better. It’s easy to get comfortable with NWX2 rather quickly. Just like the WriteNow of old.

To a certain extent, NWX2 looks and feels like Apple’s Mail.app. It’s clean, uncluttered, has a big area for the text you’re writing at the time, a toolbar across the top for handy tool requirements, and a pop-out tool pane to the right.

We like to customize our toolbars, right? NWX2 is no exception and there’s plenty of additional tools you can drag direct to the top tool bar.

What’s remarkable about Nisus Writer Express 2.0 is the ability to get something done quickly, find the tools you need for certain functions quickly, and follow the learning curve for more advanced functions, well, uh, quickly.

That was a strength of the old WriteNow and Nisus has captured much of that “essence” and “feel” in NWX2.

For example, maintaining compatibility with Microsoft Word is often (not always) a must. NWX2 can save documents to Word format, read Word format, and manage to get it right most of the time. The default save setting is for RTF (sometimes known as Rich Text Format) which is compatible, sorta, across most platforms, Mac, Windows, Linux, et al.

Writers, those who consider a word processor as their number one application will appreciate many of the built-in extras of NWX. It’s a big list. So big we need two whole pages for the review.

To read the rest of the review, Click Here for PAGE 2 and more Nisus Writer Screenshots.