I've been thinking that, until Apple's ready to unveil its Word and Excel killer, the best thing to happen to the Mac Word Processing market would be for Nisus Writer Express to adopt the Wordperfect file format.
Being Canadian, I'm allowed to say that my countrymen at Corel are idiots.
They've never been able to grasp the advantage Microsoft has with a cross-platform suite and have always viewed the Mac as being a five percent marketshare platform. What they don't get, is that us "five-percenters" have to exchange documents with dozens of Windows colleagues (sometimes hundreds, in the case of schools and small business) and so the Mac can actually influence up to 20 or 30 percent of the word processing market. Redmond understands this, Ottawa doesn't seem to.
Nisus' CEO admits in the latest MacWorld that they have no chance going head to head with Word. Why don't they make the .wp format the DEFAULT for Nisus Writer Express? That way, even if they are locked out of .doc, (which Microsoft is trying to do with the new "security features" in Word) they can advertise cross-platform compatibilty with WordPerfect. Corel has nothing to lose and everythig to gain from this as well.
The .wp format should be fairly solid, having been in use for several years. It would be a good start to whittling away at the ubiquity of .doc, at least until Apple has a real solution of its own on the market.
i have 11,000+ simpletext documents that i can't edit even a comma or semicolon without having to save the document WITH A DIFFERENT NAME !?!
that's ridiculous.
I'm one of those people who have written one million lines of computer code before Mac OS X even existed, and so I probably have had even more simpletext files than you. I sympathize with you!
I think that you can do Command-i and choose "Open with," and then proceed to choose "TextEdit."
Then click "Change All..."
This should work for all simpletext files of the same type. There are more than one kind of simpletext file, however.
I agree that having the new text editor unable to open other text documents by default is a huge mistake. I hate it when I do so by mistake and see "Launching classic..." Grrr!
I agree that having the new text editor unable to open other text documents by default is a huge mistake.
That's where you have it backwards.
SimpleText produced files that no other text editor could handle... ask me, I had a devil of a time transferring text between my beloved PowerBook 170 and the UW's VMS systems because SimpleText saved some stuff in the data fork, some in the resource fork, etc, etc.
TextEdit on the other hand produces files that ANY text editor can handle. Comparatively, it's a dream.
SimpleText was the proprietary black sheep here, not TextEdit. TE just kicks you screaming into an open text world.
Yes, I have an example. For instance, when using Text/Editor (I turned off all the extra features and selected plain text) to write Oracle code after you copy and paste the code in the Oracle environment it leaves spaces causing your code to execute incorrectly leaving errors. Windows notepad does not do this. Why does Mac's text/editor do this? It's pretty stupid and I hate it. Also, why do you have to click on 'other' to save in a different location, what happened to 'Save As'. Pretty stupid as well. I understand Mac is trying to be different, but when it comes to a text/editor just make it standard. I mean it's just a text/editor, you're not going to recreate the wheel with this one.
Yes, I have an example. For instance, when using Text/Editor (I turned off all the extra features and selected plain text) to write Oracle code after you copy and paste the code in the Oracle environment it leaves spaces causing your code to execute incorrectly leaving errors. Windows notepad does not do this. Why does Mac's text/editor do this? It's pretty stupid and I hate it. Also, why do you have to click on 'other' to save in a different location, what happened to 'Save As'. Pretty stupid as well. I understand Mac is trying to be different, but when it comes to a text/editor just make it standard. I mean it's just a text/editor, you're not going to recreate the wheel with this one.
A good alternative to Mac's Text/Edit, is TextWrangler and it's free. It doesn't leave those annoying line spaces like Text/Edit does when coping and pasting Oracle code. I hope Mac fixes that, it's pretty inconvenient having to find other alternatives for something that should be so simple and convenient.
Comments
Being Canadian, I'm allowed to say that my countrymen at Corel are idiots.
They've never been able to grasp the advantage Microsoft has with a cross-platform suite and have always viewed the Mac as being a five percent marketshare platform. What they don't get, is that us "five-percenters" have to exchange documents with dozens of Windows colleagues (sometimes hundreds, in the case of schools and small business) and so the Mac can actually influence up to 20 or 30 percent of the word processing market. Redmond understands this, Ottawa doesn't seem to.
Nisus' CEO admits in the latest MacWorld that they have no chance going head to head with Word. Why don't they make the .wp format the DEFAULT for Nisus Writer Express? That way, even if they are locked out of .doc, (which Microsoft is trying to do with the new "security features" in Word) they can advertise cross-platform compatibilty with WordPerfect. Corel has nothing to lose and everythig to gain from this as well.
The .wp format should be fairly solid, having been in use for several years. It would be a good start to whittling away at the ubiquity of .doc, at least until Apple has a real solution of its own on the market.
Originally posted by bluesigns
i have 11,000+ simpletext documents that i can't edit even a comma or semicolon without having to save the document WITH A DIFFERENT NAME !?!
that's ridiculous.
therefore it's essentially incompatible with SimpleText
which is ridiculous that Apple couldn't have their own text editor be compatible with their own text editor.
that is a flat-out, ground floor failure in my book.
if i can't count on seamless migration of the *simplest of my documents how can i have any confidence in the more complex issues?
you can't save a text document as ".html" ?
that's absolutely ridiculous.
Okay, bluesigns....its FREE.
And it kicks notepad's ass.
Have you tried changing the permissions on the files in question? Make sure they aren't "read-only".
There really isn't anything to complain about.
Now Appleworks, on the other hand, is a whole other story...
Originally posted by bluesigns
i have 11,000+ simpletext documents that i can't edit even a comma or semicolon without having to save the document WITH A DIFFERENT NAME !?!
that's ridiculous.
I'm one of those people who have written one million lines of computer code before Mac OS X even existed, and so I probably have had even more simpletext files than you. I sympathize with you!
I think that you can do Command-i and choose "Open with," and then proceed to choose "TextEdit."
Then click "Change All..."
This should work for all simpletext files of the same type. There are more than one kind of simpletext file, however.
I agree that having the new text editor unable to open other text documents by default is a huge mistake. I hate it when I do so by mistake and see "Launching classic..." Grrr!
Any simpletext file I have opens with TextEdit automatically, so I don't have to worry about that...
Originally posted by cookies
I agree that having the new text editor unable to open other text documents by default is a huge mistake.
That's where you have it backwards.
SimpleText produced files that no other text editor could handle... ask me, I had a devil of a time transferring text between my beloved PowerBook 170 and the UW's VMS systems because SimpleText saved some stuff in the data fork, some in the resource fork, etc, etc.
TextEdit on the other hand produces files that ANY text editor can handle. Comparatively, it's a dream.
SimpleText was the proprietary black sheep here, not TextEdit. TE just kicks you screaming into an open text world.
Yes, I have an example. For instance, when using Text/Editor (I turned off all the extra features and selected plain text) to write Oracle code after you copy and paste the code in the Oracle environment it leaves spaces causing your code to execute incorrectly leaving errors. Windows notepad does not do this. Why does Mac's text/editor do this? It's pretty stupid and I hate it. Also, why do you have to click on 'other' to save in a different location, what happened to 'Save As'. Pretty stupid as well. I understand Mac is trying to be different, but when it comes to a text/editor just make it standard. I mean it's just a text/editor, you're not going to recreate the wheel with this one.
Yes, I have an example. For instance, when using Text/Editor (I turned off all the extra features and selected plain text) to write Oracle code after you copy and paste the code in the Oracle environment it leaves spaces causing your code to execute incorrectly leaving errors. Windows notepad does not do this. Why does Mac's text/editor do this? It's pretty stupid and I hate it. Also, why do you have to click on 'other' to save in a different location, what happened to 'Save As'. Pretty stupid as well. I understand Mac is trying to be different, but when it comes to a text/editor just make it standard. I mean it's just a text/editor, you're not going to recreate the wheel with this one.
A good alternative to Mac's Text/Edit, is TextWrangler and it's free. It doesn't leave those annoying line spaces like Text/Edit does when coping and pasting Oracle code. I hope Mac fixes that, it's pretty inconvenient having to find other alternatives for something that should be so simple and convenient.