Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!apple!bridge2!csi!nsc!pyramid!leadsv!laic!nova!darin
From: darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Ultra-Card/Browser Bugs
Message-ID: <660@laic.UUCP>
Date: 10 Aug 89 19:42:05 GMT
References: <21232@louie.udel.EDU> 
Sender: news@laic.UUCP
Reply-To: darin@nova.UUCP (Darin Johnson)
Organization: Lockheed AI Center, Menlo Park
Lines: 38

In article  portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) writes:
>
>From what I could see of the UltraCard demo, it looked promising,
>though slow.

I took the plunge and bought UltraCard.  It is a lot faster than
the demo version I saw, especially display-wise.  Could be lots better,
but a big improvement of the demo.

Big drawback - lack of good documentation.  The manual is disorganized
and needed some proofreading.  It states that better documentation is
in the TheManual stack (since hypertext, etc. is better for documentation).
However, it tells almost nothing new, and is not very big (6 chapters
of 4 topics each - each topic half a screen).  Supposedly, if you
read through the help stack fully, etc. you can get more info.  The
list of function/commands is available.  I assume it is incomplete
since it doesn't discuss ARexx.  The only place ARexx is discussed
is in the "more..." frame, and only a tiny bit (enough to get you
going, no examples).  No registration card or info found, although
there is a BBS in Monterrey, CA.  Also, no docs on how to use the
sample stacks.  The address-book was fairly obvious, but the Calendar
isn't (from the source, it appears you can't put notes for dates
in another month but I could be wrong).  The Tutorial stack is pretty
good though (tutorial for creating stacks).  I gurued a bit too.

Also, the manual really tries to push the BBS, saying that many more
sample stacks, etc. are there.  Personally, I would rather have an
extra disk with samples, full-fledged manual, etc.  This would
be much cheaper to me than the BBS (time-wise too, with only one
phone, I can't download large files when someone might call, 1200
baud is silly when I get USENET at 19K, BBS's are usually busy, etc.).

Of course, I expect it to get better with age.  The manual hints on
things to come (compiler), and documentation can only improve.  A
second disk would really help though.

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com)
	We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.