Dear Nis-Listers,
Now that the dust has settled from the Nisus Writer Pro 2 release,
and there seem to be few complaints, I contemplate the upgrade
options, and have a few questions:
I scanned through the update list, and did not see mention of change
or resolution for two items of interest to me, and I expect/hope
others as well.
- Have either of these problems been changed in the upgrade to v2?
- Do any of you find these problems annoying?
- How would you feel about petitioning Nisus to implement user
options to be Cocoa-compliant vs Individualistic?
- Or do you have any other ideas for resolution?
And to any programmers out there, if Nisus is not willing to provide
user options, might it be possible to manually alter a plist, or a
byte or two in a resource of the App to resolve the behavior? (major
'caveat emptor', of course) Would Nisus be likely to divulge which
bytes? Or how trivial would it be to discover which bytes?
_________________________
1- Cocoa find string mutual sharing:
I'm not able to get NWP to share the system find string as other
Cocoa apps do, so I can cmd-E a selection in NWP and switch
back&forth between to Mail, TextEdit, Safari, etc. with the find
string being shared and updated by all equally. Martin at Nisus
indicated the isolation was to prevent a carefully crafted find
string from being trashed. That certainly is understandable, and
provision should indeed be in place to protect that condition. But
there is a "recent" find string menu, which it would seem adequate
protection in most cases. One thing it would not do, however, is for
hypothetical usage patterns where one simply does not want the find
string of other apps to mess with the Nisus string. This latter item
would seem to me the strongest reason for discrete user option to be
'Cocoa compliant' vs 'Individualistic'.
I discovered accidentally, that Safari has a non-intrusive variation,
which works well with its alternative to a find dialog (the little
panel that opens under the title-bar). If and when that find panel
is open, which is quite prominent or noticeable, Safari does not
accept the find string to be altered by other apps. But once it is
closed, it resumes normal Cocoa mutual sharing. I like this
behavior, now that I am aware.
Though Nisus find interface is not so simple, could this, or some
variant, be beneficial for NWP, or would a discrete user option be
better? I would be pleased with either one, just so long as I could
have achieve mutual sharing with NWP.
NW classic used to have ability to activate a macro at "switch in".
Would something on this order be possible in NWP?
_________________________
2- Triple-click selection: sentence vs paragraph
NWP introduced multi-click selection of sentences, which I applaud.
But I detest the way it was implemented in NWP 1.3 — usurping 3
clicks for sentence and moving paragraph selection to 4 clicks. This
interferes terribly with my work habits, because it clashes with
standard Cocoa app behavior. Shame on Apple for not including
sentence selection built into Cocoa. But given that, I must side
with pushing sentence selection to 4 clicks within Nisus, leaving
triple click consistent for all Cocoa apps.
Would there be any way to assign a macro to mouse clicks? Or put a
regular menu item in a contextual menu? These two items would be far
more relevant BEFORE the triple-click was usurped, but in the spirit
of brain-storming, I offer them anyhow... perhaps they would spark
some creative solution...
Thanks for all your help,
Ben Andrus
__________________________________________________
REFERENCE to help decipher triple-click behaviour anomalies, lest
any be confused as I was for a time:
a) create three paragraphs with at least two sentences each, and
then separate them with an option return (new line in same
paragraph-- what the heck term can we use now that we have so many
churned up options?) I think "soft return" is not free-- since word
processors put those in to wrap the lines, correct?
b) try the various quantities of clicks at end of document and to
the right of the return & option-return:
With NWP v1.3, I get the following responses— triple-clicks are
inconsistent between situations, and no line ends at end of document
introduces its own irregularities:
Option-return:
1- caret set to precede the option-return.
2- selects the option-return
3- selects the sentence FOLLOWING the option-return
4- selects the paragraph
Return:
1- caret set to precede the return.
2- selects the return
3- selects nothing (same as #1— sets caret before return)
4- selects the paragraph, including the return
Document end:
1- caret set to end of line/document.
2- selects preceding (final) word (or punctuation char)
3- selects preceding sentence.
4- selects the paragraph, which has no return.
__________________________________________________
|