https://web.archive.org/web/20250717090627/https://nisus.com...
Now I am curious about what language it is written in, as well as the architecture and other details.
There is nothing stopping the author from buying a 2013 Mac Pro "Trash Can" with 64GB RAM, and running it in perpetuity. RTF import/export won't stop working, documents won't bloat beyond what 64GB RAM can handle, etc.
I have used Nisus Writer Pro for several years, replacing MS Word for my personal text writing. And I loved it. Sorry to see that devs get older and cannot maintain it anymore.
Same is true for other apps that I heavily rely on. For instance DevonThink. I don’t know how solid the company is, what their future looks like.
Oh, they exist, but did a rug pull with a switch to half-assed subscription model last year, increasing the cost threefold over the same time period. But it is ok, we all know that making a proprietary software a cornerstone of your workflow is a long-term risk. I've dropped them and never looked back.
If the market is saturated and they're not going to sell any new copies, then they're just going to go out of business.
If they have existing customers which want the software to continue to exist on an operating system designed to make existing software stop working every few years... then customers paying for the privilege of keeping the thing working on Mac OS seems like the only option.
(For reference, on Windows you can just run stuff from 1995 with basically no problems.)
I hate subscriptions as much as the next guy, but if something is mission critical and irreplaceable, the $15/month for "I need this to keep working" seems pretty reasonable. If there's a non-trivial number of people in a similar situation, maybe they could work something out.
TL;DR I migrated back to the filesystem, with several smaller, more focused tools to replace DT’d functions in better ways.
I’d still be on DT but their pricing model is insane today. A $200 license gets you two computers. Have a work laptop, personal laptop, and an iMac in your home office? Too bad! Pick the one you don’t want to access your data on, or buy another license! LOL, no. They say this is to have pricing that’s “fair to everyone”, but apparently by being universally crummy.
I’m glad they pushed me to using a Unix-philosophy collection of more focused tools, though. Each of those is better at their own thing than DT is.
Way happier now - DT did what I expected, but it was ugly, slow and cumbersome. Now I have a loose collection of tools and if I do not like Find Any Files, I can switch to ripgrep or whatever. Don't like CarbonCopyCloner? Take any other backup/sync solution, no problems.
I always have this strong preconception about proprietary Mac apps. When a screenshot tool costs for example $30
That would be a death sentence, even if the company had good financials, which it also sounds like it does not.
Open sourcing it sounds very unlikely in that condition.
The only thing I can think of is to switch to a subscription model. If there's enough people who rely on it and need it to keep working despite Mac OS updates. Then it seems fair to continue paying for development?
(If there's enough people like that, maybe they could organize something and contact the company... maybe)
Nisus also might be the Mac app that had the unusual scrollbars and basically no minimum size on the edit window.
You could make the window maybe 10 characters by 5 lines, and the arrows in the scrollbar would change to a smaller size.
Then smaller still and the scrollbar itself would get narrower.
Then smaller still and the arrows would change again, to simple triangles.
Then smaller again and the arrows would overlap and change to point right and left instead of up and down.
You could make the window so small only a single letter would display, then even a fraction of that letter.
Good times.
aeontech•3mo ago