Re: New XyWrite release

[kbf@xxxxxxxx]

Carl DiStefano seems to remember my being "adamant" that a new
version would be released by years end. He may be right, but
what I intended was to say (the software business being what it
is) that year-end was our goal. At this point it does not seem
that is likely, but we fully expect it to occur within the first
quarter.

The new product is a major undertaking for us, and it is a fairly
significant departure from previous products in a number of
ways, without abandoning any of the current functionality.

There has been some recent talk here about true collapsible
outlining, and I hope that will be part of that release. The
lower level functions to accomplish it are in place, and since
even the 16 bit version is 32 bit internally, we can manipulate
large chunks of text in memory.

While this new product has much interesting new functionality,
there seems to be several tradeoffs that I am not sure will be
pleasing to everyone, and so I am going to mention them here to
see what kind of reaction I get.

First, it appears that the load time for the product is
materially longer than current XyWin. While it is not too
noticeable on newer, faster machines, it could be annoying if
you load and unload the product a lot. Performance once the
product is loaded is as good if not better than current XyWin.

Second, and predictably, the disk footprint is larger. I would
not be surprised if a full install took 15-18 MB.

Thoughts?

K.