Great story! Here’s what I gathered: The founders are in their 80s and may be completely retired. It’s unclear what their perspective is on open source or whether they have considered selling the app to someone (if that someone even exists) who would ensure the same level of dedication that they provided. The code might be legacy, difficult to maintain without a significant rewrite, so the costs of updating the app could be prohibitively expensive.
Now I am curious about what language it is written in, as well as the architecture and other details.
I think Nisus was the app that had a fun About... window easter egg: if you did it with the option key down, little stick figures would assemble (or disassemble?) the dialog letter by letter, running back and forth frantically to do so.
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.
For circumstances like this I create a VM with a version of MacOS that the app works with, and keep it on life support that way (doing this at the moment for Finale, music notation software that works well with Piano Marvel and thus gamifies piano practice for my kids…)
What freaked me out a bit was reading “100% mission critical”. I may not fully get the niche issues that the product resolves here but if it’s really 100% mission critical, I’d only use FOSS or make a mix of tools.
The app is not activation-locked to a remote server, from what I can tell.
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.
In many ways being able to run something on a stable, well emulated, platform can be a better way to know some tool will always be around than to have the source code for the tool itself (even if that is definitely also a good thing). There is a much better chance that someone will e.g. keep maintaining some forks of DOSBox to keep it running than that there will be people around to maintain a specific tool. Not sure how that looks for MacOS applications? Of course support for running fully offline and without messy DRM is a must.
Nisus' killer feature back in the day was that it was a word processor that supported regular expressions for find and replace, which at the time were only found in text editors for writing code. But yes, LibreOffice supports that now.
At this point it sounds like there's no one left at the company who still cares.
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)
What a beautiful app. Sorry to see it become abandonware soon. - Same happened to other apps like that. Years ago I used and loved Netmanage’s EccoPro as a personal information manager (PIM). It was an outliner, an address book, a database. Way ahead of its time. But it was abandoned.
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.
> 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.
I was thinking the only option that makes economic sense for Nisus writer is a subscription.
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.
A bunch of tools - Carbon Copy Cloner for backup, Cryptomator for syncing my docs to iOS, Samurai Search for searching through docs on iOS, Find Any File for search on Mac, and refiling... whatever, I've used a loosely hierarchical structure before, so I refiled with Alfred for some time, then I wrote a small script for dired in emacs.
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.
Same here. Using lots of different tools. Many cli based. Yazi as file manager (TUI app), Houdahspot for searching fulltext plus preview, Hazel, and many more. Recently started migrating my pdf documents from devonthink to Obsidian.
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.
Great story! Here’s what I gathered: The founders are in their 80s and may be completely retired. It’s unclear what their perspective is on open source or whether they have considered selling the app to someone (if that someone even exists) who would ensure the same level of dedication that they provided. The code might be legacy, difficult to maintain without a significant rewrite, so the costs of updating the app could be prohibitively expensive.
Now I am curious about what language it is written in, as well as the architecture and other details.
I think Nisus was the app that had a fun About... window easter egg: if you did it with the option key down, little stick figures would assemble (or disassemble?) the dialog letter by letter, running back and forth frantically to do so.
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.
I hope they find a way to open-source it! Seeing years of hard engineering work disappear into a black hole would be truly sad.
For circumstances like this I create a VM with a version of MacOS that the app works with, and keep it on life support that way (doing this at the moment for Finale, music notation software that works well with Piano Marvel and thus gamifies piano practice for my kids…)
Yeah, that's what most of the Mac folks who want to run Freehand/MX do (I find it easier to just run it in Windows 11).
What freaked me out a bit was reading “100% mission critical”. I may not fully get the niche issues that the product resolves here but if it’s really 100% mission critical, I’d only use FOSS or make a mix of tools.
The app is not activation-locked to a remote server, from what I can tell.
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.
In many ways being able to run something on a stable, well emulated, platform can be a better way to know some tool will always be around than to have the source code for the tool itself (even if that is definitely also a good thing). There is a much better chance that someone will e.g. keep maintaining some forks of DOSBox to keep it running than that there will be people around to maintain a specific tool. Not sure how that looks for MacOS applications? Of course support for running fully offline and without messy DRM is a must.
A quick search pointed me to https://github.com/darlinghq/darling
This is what happens if you make a proprietary app central to your vocation: sooner or later you learn you are a houseguest, not a homeowner.
I'm curious what does it do that Libre Office can't do?
I always have this strong preconception about proprietary Mac apps. When a screenshot tool costs for example $30
Nisus' killer feature back in the day was that it was a word processor that supported regular expressions for find and replace, which at the time were only found in text editors for writing code. But yes, LibreOffice supports that now.
I think this is a lot more similar to Scrivener, where it’s designed to manage huge, complicated docks in multiple sections.
Sure, today, but this was originally released 11 years before OpenOffice was open sourced.
At this point it sounds like there's no one left at the company who still cares.
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)
Never had a Mac, but damn I love their app product pages. Wanted to link, it may be HN hugged to death currently.
How about an Internet Archive link
https://web.archive.org/web/20250717090627/https://nisus.com...
Maybe it will be acquired by Canva and ported to Windows and Linux. I use Nisus all the time.
What a beautiful app. Sorry to see it become abandonware soon. - Same happened to other apps like that. Years ago I used and loved Netmanage’s EccoPro as a personal information manager (PIM). It was an outliner, an address book, a database. Way ahead of its time. But it was abandoned.
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.
> 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.
I was thinking the only option that makes economic sense for Nisus writer is a subscription.
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.
What are you using now, if I may ask?
A bunch of tools - Carbon Copy Cloner for backup, Cryptomator for syncing my docs to iOS, Samurai Search for searching through docs on iOS, Find Any File for search on Mac, and refiling... whatever, I've used a loosely hierarchical structure before, so I refiled with Alfred for some time, then I wrote a small script for dired in emacs.
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.
Same here. Using lots of different tools. Many cli based. Yazi as file manager (TUI app), Houdahspot for searching fulltext plus preview, Hazel, and many more. Recently started migrating my pdf documents from devonthink to Obsidian.
Different person, but here’s what I moved to: https://honeypot.net/2024/05/31/retiring-devonthink.html
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.
This was basically my conclusion when I was evaluating DEVONthink earlier this year.
And it’s a pity, because DT is very nice. It’s not that nice to justify its exorbitant price tag, but still.
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.