For Mellel, setting out to cater to Hebrew writers as one of its primary markets, I believe, this was a deal breaker.Īt least, that's my take on it all. For Nisus, with its foundation in the English language market but a big interest in the multi-lingual market, this was a problem which Apple promised to fix pretty quickly, but it was not a deal breaker given the outlook at the time. One of the early problems with the Apple text engine was that its handling of non-Roman script languages was not as good as it needed to be. The developer of Mellel went the other way and built his own text engine. I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision. They could throw out all thyeir work and start again developing their own text engine which would be a Carbon app - and Apple was promising to kill Carbon - or they could proceed with Cocoa hoping that Apple would get its stuff together and keep its promises to developers, so they, in turn, could keep their promises to customers.
![neooffice new paragraph versus new line neooffice new paragraph versus new line](https://www.computerhope.com/issues/pictures/word-shortcut.gif)
That left developers like Nisus who had embarked on work using the text engine as a foundation, up a gum tree, as we sayhere in Oz. OS X is basically a lash up with bits from a variety of sources, which explains why it was like jelly for so long so that developers like Nisus were constantly sinking into the swamp.Ģ) The text engine was supposed to be developed along with the OS X, but as I understand it, it stood for years very much as it was originally shown, as the Apple engineers struggled with unknown unknowns in the OS. Check VM Fusion 's site for a dismantling of the OS X myth. It wasn't nearly as good or as sophisticated as Apple claimed at the time, and most importantly, it wasn't nearly as ready for prime time nor was it nearly as soklidly "of a piece" as Apple claimed. Even the true sceptics (including a bunch of programmers) were knocked out.ġ) The underlying OS X. During the course of the demo, one programmer added half-a-dozen features to the text engine to show off its capabilities. Maybe the Apple text engine looks like a poor choice now, but I can assure you that it didn't back when Nisus made it.Īpple was demonstrating its OS X to everyone and one of its great points was the text engine which meant you could use as the foundation for a very sophisticated text processor. I can't see a way back from this poor choice, except yet another completely new software.
![neooffice new paragraph versus new line neooffice new paragraph versus new line](http://www.lpgallery.mb.ca/ooffice/Writer/images/w3.jpg)
For some unexplained reason chose to use apple's one with OSX.