The MacEdition Interview: Jerzy Lewak, CEO, Nisus Software

December 4, 2002

It’s been ten months since we last interviewed Mr. Lewak concerning Nisus, Apple development and other topics. With the recent announcements of Nisus acquiring Okito Software and the first look at Nisus Writer for Mac OS X, we felt it was time to go back and find out what is new in the world of Nisus. The following is the result of an email interview.

ME: In January, we discussed the Cocoa version of Nisus Writer. The concepts of Apple’s developer support and the difficulties of rewriting a legacy application from scratch weighed heavily on that. Now, with the purchase of Okito Composer, it seems the product to be known as Nisus Writer X is finally seeing the light of day. Is this strategy a capitulation to the difficulties in moving an existing app to Cocoa?

JL: No, I would not describe it as capitulation, but rather as grabbing an opportunity that presented itself. Here are the reasons. First we saw what Okito had done and liked it. Second, we saw that the features they had implemented we also wanted, but had not yet implemented in our Cocoa project. We reasoned that, provided the two codebases were reasonably compatible, it would save time and make a stronger product if we merged our features with theirs. Third, by acquiring Okito we would also have a stronger team to complete the development of the new Nisus Writer.

ME: What are going to be some of the strongest features of the new Nisus Writer that users should expect when the Mac OS X version finally comes out?

JL: Strongest features are always a matter of personal judgement, but the fact that it is written in Cocoa means that, amongst other things, it can take advantage of easier cooperation with other products. In addition, of course, it will have the flavor of the current version of Nisus Writer, but with improvements in implementation and GUI.

ME: Obviously, it’s not possible to bring over every feature when doing a rewrite of an application, and features that you do bring over may change. You alluded to this in the original interview. Would you like to give an example of a feature that Nisus has taken the opportunity to “do better” with the new version of Writer?

JL: Here are some examples of features that we are building. Our very powerful search and replace tool will of course be there, though with slightly changed PowerFind and PowerFind Pro details. A very much improved macro capability, the details of which we are keeping a surprise, will enable anyone sufficiently talented to write custom features for automated processing of any kind. This is particularly easy and clean to implement in OS X.

We have always made it our mission to build applications that encourage users’ creativity. This new macro feature will make Nisus Writer far more open to that creativity than any other product, and any other version of Nisus Writer.

We will also include support for those that work with a lot of text, not necessarily formatted. These text-only features will upgrade our other product – QUED/M – a text editor, the predecessor of Nisus Writer and one that developed the core engine of Nisus Writer. We may release these as two separate products and perhaps also as a combined product.

Although OS X is an excellent new system, it is not yet sufficiently mature to allow a quick development cycle for Nisus Writer. One of the serious drawbacks that I am sure everyone is well aware of is the relatively poor responsiveness (speed) of Cocoa applications. We are working hard to overcome this and other problems of OS X and this is the reason we have not yet come out with an OS X version of Nisus Writer. We also want to assure our customers that we will do our utmost to provide the best possible multilingual support – something that would be much simpler and quicker if Apple had finished their text engine. Bidirectional text support, in particular, is not complete in the current version of the system.

ME: The Okito acquisition was a bit of a surprise. Is Nisus looking to acquire other products/companies or was this a unique case?

JL: It was a unique circumstance and we are not looking for other acquisitions.

ME: Now that your developers have had another nine months of developing in Cocoa, what would you say is Apple’s strongest advantage in that environment? Has any area greatly improved over this time? Is there an area that affects Nisus that still needs attention?

JL: I think the fact that OS X runs in a Unix environment, which enables it to have protected memory, multitasking and other well-known attributes of the Unix system, is a great advantage. In addition, and more particularly, Apple has made a good start at developing very powerful and versatile text handling tools (ATSUI) which we are eager to apply. The problem is that the necessary basic text engine which would save us a lot of time is not quite ready.

ME: Using all the hindsight you can muster (allowing for the fact that Nisus Writer for X isn’t out yet), how would you characterize the decision to do the rewrite in order to be native on Mac OS X? Does it still seem to be the right decision? What words of advice would you offer to other developers/companies who may be debating a rewrite (Cocoa) versus a port (Carbon)?

JL: Good question. I don’t think that enough time has passed for my perspective to be good enough to answer this with great conviction. With that caveat, if we can overcome successfully some of the immature aspects of the new system, our path will be vindicated. And of course I have confidence that this will happen. Others who may be considering the two alternative paths must examine the system capabilities to see if they are ready for what they want to achieve. I am biased towards a Cocoa approach because that is the future and is the best way to take advantage of the new system features.

ME: Much has been made in the press about Microsoft and Apple tussling over adoption rates of Mac OS X. Given the effort that Nisus is investing in making Writer native, how does it look from your perspective? Smaller companies are generally more sensitive to the size of the potential market; do you agree that there is a problem in adoption? Is Jaguar changing that?

JL: I am sure Apple would prefer a faster rate of adoption, but from our experience we sense that the interest exhibited by people in the new system is very high. Because we are a small company, we need to satisfy our current customers and attract new ones. Signs are good that the new version will do that.

ME: Related to adoption and market size, Apple and Microsoft seem to be moving apart and cooperating less frequently. Is this another opportunity for companies like Nisus to break into new markets or otherwise increase the presence of their products?

JL: Exactly – that is an opportunity.

ME: Are there any comments of your own that you’d like to add?

JL: I believe that the development system and the operating system both need much more work to be considered mature and complete.

I have said this publicly many times before and I will repeat it: I think that Apple has made a strategic mistake in not focusing sufficient effort on the development system, even way back when they created Claris. That should have been Claris’s mission.

If the development systems on the Apple platform were at least as mature as those on the Windows platform and if they could be used to produce applications on the Windows platform also, there would be no shortage of Macintosh software and we would have released our Cocoa version by now.

We at MacEdition would like to thank Mr. Lewak for taking the time to participate in this interview.

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