Matt Neuburg
Matt Neuburg has been writing for TidBITS since 1991, concentrating on issues surrounding word processing, databases and text organization programs, scripting and innovative programming systems, and a variety of utilities. He has written some popular freeware programs, such as MemoryStick and NotLight. He has created the online documentation for a number of applications, such as Script Debugger and Opal. He has written books about programming Frontier, REALbasic, and AppleScript, and is the author of various Take Control ebooks.
One senses Nisus's originality from the moment of starting to type. The blinking insertion point vanishes and does not reappear; lines of text after it do not move out of the way as you type, but are temporarily ignored
The text window can be scrolled vertically or horizontally. Icons at lower left and upper right of the window allow you to: split it horizontally or vertically (or both at once, giving four panes and four sets of scroll bars); show or hide a horizontal and/or a vertical ruler (a unique and occasionally invaluable feature); toggle between text and graphics mode; or show or hide a row of page, line, character, and memory information
Menus, too, show the originality of Nisus's philosophy. A number of menus are hierarchical. You can make the Macros menu and the Windows menu pop down directly from the title bar of a window with a click while holding down the option or command key, so you don't have to go to the trouble of finding your way in from the menubar
(with comments by Adam C. Engst, [email protected])
We're experimenting with a new distribution method with this review of Nisus. Quite frankly, it's not a program that can be trifled with in a review, and the TidBITS review will be rather long
SuperPaint, the old workhorse that started life as little more than a combination of a MacPaint clone and a MacDraw clone, has been given a new lease on life in the competitive world of increasingly sophisticated drawing and painting programs