Well Brian.:-) - I do fear that this on the long term might cause the
death of NisusWriter for all of us, who donot want to be depending on
what Apple decide to be useful for us. I could never dream of buying
_anything_ through such a store - Apple AppStore or any other for that
matter! - It would be fully alright, /if/ Apple reduced their influence
to only guarantee that an app sold through AppStore would be fully
working on this or thus system version.
And - if what we hear in the press - is correct that Apple claims up to
30% of every copy sold through AppStore, it also will reduce the Nisus
income with that 30%!
We have already seen a few results and consequencies of this new policy
from Apple here in Denmark... Our next-largest newspaper - House of
Berlinske - has been denied to sell their iPhone/iPad/iPodTouch app
through AppStore, and users of iPhone/iPad/iPodtouch are forbidden the
use of the app, and if they do, the app will automatically be removed
through next software update.
Reason? - House of Berlinske consist of two large newspapers - Berlinske
Tidende - a very serious newspaper, and a more hm... 'boulevard-like'
newspaper called B.T., which sometimes - infact nearly every day - shows
one or more pin-ups... The chief of AppleDenmark said to the press that
"We donot allow such things either sold nor used on our products". - So
now House of Berlinske is forced to develop two independant apps for
each newspaper. - The same has happened to our largest newspapers -
Jyllandsposten and Politiken from the House of Jyllandsposten, because
the Politiken also has a boulevard-like newspaper called Ekstrabladet.
This is indeed a severe reduction in freedom of expression rights!
And what will happen, if and when Apple suddenly decides that this or
thus application - fx. NisusWriter, OpenOffice, Filemaker, Adobe CS,
etx. - no longer will have the rights to be used on the Apple systems,
because we no longer can buy these apps outside the AppStore?
As things are looking now, this will end up in a totally closed and
monopolic system that indeed is against not only the U.S. anti-trust law
suite suites, but indeed also against nearly any law suite within the EU
with associated countries - i.e. a restriction in our psersonal rights
to use what we prefer.
Rumours already are spreading that this will happen already with the
upcoming Lion system. - That one won't be able to install apps that
aren't certified by Apple, - and that you won't be able to install
_anyhthing, unless you have an internet connection, since information
must be controlled and certified from Apple already in the installation
procedures...
/IF/ this happens - like it seems to do right now - I've bought my
last Apple computer and system - That in spite that both the OS X and
the hardware are so much better than any other on the market right now...!!
But I sure hope that Apple will be in possession of common sense before
it gets that far!
Cheers, Erik Richard
Brian Ferguson wrote:
> I have just looked at the Nisus Forum.
>
> <http://www.nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4048>
>
> And, a version of Nisus for the Apple App Store is being worked
> upon.
>
> I rarely argue with Erik but not using the App Store for initial
> sales and new users would be foolish from a corporate point of
> view.
>
> In fact, Nisus would be irresponsible not to adopt this approach
> for getting a product into a selling area which will be read by
> many, many current non-users of NWP.
>
> On 14/02/2011, at 10:48 PM, Erik Richard Sørensen wrote:
>>> And what on earth do people think is actually happening at Nisus? My
>>> take on the software market (in fact, just about any market these days)
>>> is that you need to keep pushing your product(s) forward with face
>>> lifts, incremental upgrades, etc.
>>> it's all very well to have a bunch of supportive customers, but
>>> they're not much use to you if they aren't buying anything because
>>> you're not giving them anything to buy! :D
>>
>> Well, I think smaller changes and add-ons will occour - such as being
>> able to increase font sizes larger than 128p using the arrows and not
>> having to type in the wanted size. This feature is especially needed
>> when you're using deco fonts.
>>
>> What Brian proposes such as an AppStore version...hm... I donot think
>> that this will be a good idea. This will cause that you will not be able
>> to use the program on any other computer or system that it is downloaded
>> to. We can already see this now that Textwrangler has been released in
>> a AppStore version. This version is only usable on OS X 10.6 and
>> therefore also only on Intel Machines. - And why on earth should Apple
>> be the decider to what _they_ think will be good or not for use on an
>> Apple computer? - OK, they of course at the same time guarantee that
>> the app will be working. But many of us are still using non-Intel Macs
>> - and why on earth aren't we also allowed to use these cheaper apps?
>>
>> And I sure donot hope that Nisus are so stupid to go into that kind
>> of business! - /IF/ they should do anything they should instead 'reduce'
>> the NWE to a minimum and release this app - maybe called NisusMini for
>> the iPhone/iPad AppStore. This will sure give quite a lot better
>> usability making text documents - especially on the iPad instead of
>> that pice of crap that now is available on that one. - And of course
>> such a 'NisusMini' version MUST have all the main features and also
>> include the possibility of being able to use full scripting - else it
>> would be worthless...
--
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Erik Richard Sørensen, Member of ADC, <[log in to unmask]>
NisusWriter - The Future In Multilingual Text Processing - www.nisus.com
Openoffice.org - The Modern Productivity Solution - www.openoffice.org
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