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 Lines: 156 >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.