Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite -- I'm sorry, but...
Message-ID: <55035@sun.uucp>
Date: 1 Jun 88 18:00:41 GMT
References: <8013@drutx.ATT.COM>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality
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>My position:  I think FullWrite has a way to go before it challenges Word as 
>powerful balanced document tool.

I would say it this way. FullWrite has a way to go before it becomes what 
it's potential shows that it should be.

I feel that it already matches Word in power and beats it in ease of use and
flexibility. There are certainly some areas where it is weaker, but there
are some areas where it is much stronger, too. So all of this is on balance.
If the areas where it is weaker (some formatting issues and styles) are
critical for you, it might not be a good time to switch over.

>And also that Word could be improved
>to match ease of use, mostly through some easy visual controls/indicators 
>added to work with its rich style abilities.

Microsoft hasn't shown any great track record on "improving" their user
interface in my mind. Word 3.x always felt to me like a PC program with a
veneer on it, rather than a Macintosh program. I could get it to do what I
wanted it to do, but I always felt like it was fighting back. I don't have
that feeling with FWP.

>To begin, my model of working with Word has been:  quickly write some text.
>Then hit it with styles and the index/contents tools to produce a very finished
>looking product almost immediately.  Pictures and multi-column/sidebars take 
>a bit of fussing with display page.

My model is very similar, as a matter of fact. What's important, though, is
that you stop trying to do things the way Word does them. The writing
paradigms are very different, and until you stop trying to make FullWrite
act like Word and start doing things the way FWP was designed to do them,
you're going to be very frustrated. 

Think how frustrated you'd be if you were trying to go the other way, and 
kept trying to bring up sidebars in Word to store stuff in. It isn't fair
to put down one program because it isn't like another program. That's MUCH
different than putting a program down because it can't do something.

>I couldn't seem to find anything like this power in FullWrite.

It's there. Once you start working with FullWrite, you'll find it.

>it feels rather like MacWrite -- you know, rulers everywhere, because it's the 
>only way to get what you'd like.

Not at all true. I use rulers more in FWP than I did in Word, but only
because you can't (yet) put rulers in your styles. Word has just as many
rulers, it's just that the display mechanisms are different (and, of course,
you can turn them off in both). 

Assuming rulers are turned on in both, what Word does is show the current
ruler in the ruler bar at the top of the window. What FWP does is show the
rulers, in context, with the text. I find the latter much nicer to use,
since I can SEE where the ruler definitions change. With Word, that can be a
pain.

>In fairness, the sum experience was this weekend, trying to move a medium size
>(50 page) document from Word 3.  The translator worked somewhat; at least all 
>my text and pictures came through.  However, much formatting, including 
>headings, was lost.  It did tell me so.

I've been using it three-and-a-half weeks. A weekend with a program of this
complexity is nothing, frankly. It took me about two weeks to really start
getting any kind of feel for it at all, and I'm just starting to be what I
would consider proficient, having now slogged about 60K worth of stuff
through it.

How long did it take you to learn Word to the point where you could beat it
into submission? It took me longer than it's taken with FullWrite.

>The style model especially seems to be missing essential design and user 
>freedom features.

The style model is weaker than Word. Ashton-Tate on CompuServe has
acknowledged this, and has said (without going into details) that it'll
be significantly enhanced in the next release due this fall. I would
expect that the new release will allow styles to have most of the
functionality of Word styles, including paragraph spacing and rulers.
There may also be something like a "Based on" style.

>    1) The outliner requires selecting the entire document first, to
>    generate an outline.  I couldn't even seem find a way to do this, 
>    across chapter boundaries.

Chapters are completely separate entities, and (basically) nothing crosses
the boundaries. This may or may get relaxed later, it's a fairly basic part
of the design of the program. What WILL happen is that the next release will
be smaller, faster and make better use of chapters so that chapters can be
larger, reducing the need to arbitrarily split text up for memory management.

>    2)  Working with graphics seemed unduly difficult;  also the
>    drawing tools, including interface to Bezier curves, seem very
>    awkward.  I agree that they could be well left out; would
>    rather use SuperPaint, especially as it's upgrade promises.

I haven't used FWP enough to comment, but I will point out that Word 4.0
will ship with SuperPaint, the current version, not the upcoming SuperPaint
II. So if you want the added features of SP II, you still have to go and buy
it... I'm ALSO looking forward to SP II since it will do auto-tracing of
bitmaps, which I can then shift over to Freehand to manipulate. (at least
until Freehand comes out with an auto-tracing mode).

>If you really needed such a tool, weren't you glad it was there?  I have 
>been.  Think few of us are really in a position to cast such stones.

I was very glad I had word 3.0. I would have died limited to MacWrite or 
WriteNow. But it always felt to me like it was hoarding it's power -- it
would always make me fight to get what I wanted out of it. FullWrite doesn't
do that to me. I also have problems with Microsoft as a corporation -- the
hassles getting information, the inability of them to let me know of new
versions (yes, they DID ship out 3.01 free, bless them. But did they bother
to send you a message when they released 3.02? Or Excel 1.06? Or did you
find out from a friend, and then wait four or five weeks for the upgrade to
show?). I'm getting much better vibes from Ashton-Tate on support and
futures for the product -- and they aren't afraid to admit to bugs in public
(I'm keeping an eye on the A-T Forum on CompuServe. There's a very
refreshing openness and a high level of expertise on that board, things I
always felt were missing from Microsoft's on-line groups up there -- where
the common answer seemed to be either silence or "Call our support number")

This doesn't make Word a worse Word Processor. But FWP is the first one I've
seen that has the power to take Word on in its own territory. And FWP is the
first WP that really has been designed to be a Macintosh word processor. And
it shows -- it is, for all it's power and complexity, simple and intuitive.

>And just because a company's getting big, or has to do with IBM (now, I
>might have to think about that one), doesn't automatically bring evil.

No, by a long shot. Ashton-Tate ain't small. But I have talked to dozens of
people who have had to order upgrades (that they found out about on Bulletin
boards) for bug fixes in Microsoft products. And had the request get lost,
sometimes two or three times. When Excel is crashing every few minutes on
your Mac II, and it takes you twelve weeks to get the fixed version of the
program because Microsoft lost the request twice and then spent three weeks
shipping it to you, it doesn't engender a lot of corporate loyalty. And I
know enough people who have been in this position that I don't believe it to
be a rare fluke. It happens a lot. 

I used to work with a lot of Microsoft products. Microsoft File, which
hasn't been updated since 1984 (it'll get a facelife this year, but I wonder
why they bother). Word 1.05, later Word 3.0, later 3.01. A love/hate
relationship. Excel 1.04 (now 1.06, but I haven't asked for it). 

The only one I have left is Excel (actually, I have Word on my disk,
primarily because my editor requires my articles to be shipped in Word
format -- so I write in Fullwrite, export in Macwrite, and import into word
before mailing it off. Other than that...). And my guess is that Full Impact
may well do for Excel what FullWrite seems to be doing for Word -- giving
people a choice (for the record, I really like Excel, and have no intention
of switching over.)


Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ

	Robert A. Heinlein: 1907-1988. He will never truly die as long as we
                           read his words and speak his name. Rest in Peace.