04.27.03

Nisus Writer Express

Posted in Software at 8:40 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Nisus Writer (now called Nisus Writer Classic) is, as far as I can tell from the enthusiastic local faculty users, the Mac word processor of choice for Hebrew and Arabic. I used to stop by the Nisus booth at Mac World and was astonished by the ease with which users created multi-column documents, annotations, and multi-language documents. Nisus Writer was the first, and possibly the only application I’ve seen with support for non-contiguous text selection. Later, when I got my first lap top, I used Nisus Writer Compact, and the free Nisus 4.1.6. I bought a copy of Nisus Writer 6 in 2001, but didn’t get a chance to use it before I began using OS X. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the OS X version.

Last week I downloaded the new Beta of Nisus Writer Express. It’s a Mac OS X response to OS 9 (and earlier) Nisus Writer that users have been using for years (I know a devout Nisus Writer Classic user and Egyptologist who wrote her dissertation in Nisus Compact). I notice that Gene Steinberg has good things to say. After using it for several days now, I'’m quite pleased with Nisus Writer Express. It’s well-designed, responsive and has a lovely clean interface; frankly, I think think the only competition it will have is Mariner Write, another lovely Mac OS X word processor.

In addition to an elegant interface, with intelligent use of OS X Cocoa features like drawers and sheets, Nisus Writer Express offers Unicode support, RTF support, Microsoft Word read and write support, AppleScript, and GREP find/replace. But one feature of the Nisus Writer Express beta really caught my eye. Check out the Macro menu; that’s right, native support of Perl macros. That’s the kind of really neat feature you’d expect from Mac OS X and Nisus. Now, I’m hoping that they’ll provide an easy way for me to access and insert the Unicode characters I need for my dissertation, specifically upper and lower case thorn, y-umlaut, eth, and yogh. I can use them in TextEdit, and I can see the characters in the various Apple provided fonts, but I don’t have a word processor that can access them (Adobe’s InDesign does).

04.25.03

New Apple Store in Santa Monica, CA

Posted in Macintosh at 9:32 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Some of you may have seen the employment listings here beginning last fall. More of you probably saw this announcement. Well, now, finally, here’s photographic proof of the Santa Monica Apple Store on the Third Street Promenade, next to Hennessey and Ingalls‘ art and architecture book store. You can see the logo from a block or so away, despite the vandalism, and now, finally, we offer you a top secret peek inside the new store itself.

04.14.03

Safari and iSynch?

Posted in Macintosh at 9:30 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I downloaded the new Public Beta 2.0 of Apple’s Safari, the fast, elegant, streamlined web browser for OS X. I’ve liked Safari right from the start, largly because ot the interface and feature set (and now with tabbed browsing!). It doesn’t include mail or Usenet newsreading, two things I don’t want from a browser, but it does include very nice (and intelligent) book mark management and that’s a particularly important feature for me.

I was doing a little bookmark arranging tonight, dragging around the bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar, when I got a dialog that said I couldn’t rearrange bookmarks because “iSync was synchronizing your bookmarks.” Now, I wasn’t even running iSync (I did check) so I suppose bookmark synching is a possible feature for the future. Bookmark synching is certainly a good thing to offer, especially if users have a way to make their bookmarks available to them from Mac.com, and can choose to make them public or private.

On a slightly different topic, I’m really enjoying the tabbed browsing in Safari. You can

  1. Select a group of bookmarks

  2. Add the bookmarks to a folder

  3. Drag the folder to the Bookmark Bar

  4. Click the folder, and choose “Open in Tabs” from the contextual menu

  5. Safari will politely place each bookmark in its own Tab, replacing any previous content.

Yes, I know, you can do the same thing, pretty much, in Mozilla. In any case, thanks Dave

04.09.03

Composition This Time

Posted in English at 5:34 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

This time I’m teaching English Composition. I’ve not (yet) persuaded the students to blog, but I have at least started a blog for the class. I’m also using the official WebCT site.

Composition instruction is, of course, a natural for blogging, both for and by students. I was hoping some would be interested in web logs as a digital alternative to the required reading journal. I do have one student who actually has a blog, which is promising.

I notice that a large number of those involved in eBN, the Educational Blogger’s Network, are Composition and Rhetoric faculty. This is not at all surprising, given the nature of web logs, and the fact that Composition facutly have been in the forefront of the teaching with technology movement, including a national Computers and Writing conference and the twenty year old Computers and Composition journal.