Fellow XyWriters,
XyWrite V (based on Nota
Bene) is now a real possibility.
I've been in informal
discussions with Nota Bene's Steve Siebert about
our
financing their development of a 32-bit version of
XyWrite, based
on the 32-bit engine they developed for
Nota Bene.
This, "XyWrite 5," would run
on 64-bit systems, without any virtualization
(as in
vDos) needed. What they already have, for Nota Bene,
is written in
Assembler (as XyWrite has always been)
and is adapted to sit on top of
Windows. What Steve is
talking about doing is streamlining what they
have and
getting it to work with the U2, then adding whatever
features we
are willing to pay for.
I have been using VDosPlus
for some months, and I am very, very grateful
to
Wengier for developing it. This new program would,
however, have advantages:
1. Windows screen fonts--all
of them (yes, I mean fonts like Arial and
Georgia, not
just monospaced fonts).
2. Windows undo. Ctrl-z undo,
of virtually unlimited depth.
3. Windows printer drivers,
so that you can print from XyWrite just as
you do from
Notepad and Word.
4. Windows Clipboard.
5. Windows color palette (I
think).
6. Running without
virtualization (should be considerably faster).
7. More memory for programs
and keyboard files, etc. As I understand it, a
reasonably priced XyWrite 5 won't give us megabytes of
memory, but it can
definitely give us something like
triple or quadruple the program and module
memory we
now have.
So, what we need now from the
XyWrite collective is an indication of how
many people
want which features and would be willing to pay for
it.
Running the U2 is a given;
there's no viable project without that. And all the
above Windows-based features are already there, though
they may need tweaking.
And having something a lot
closer to the XyWrite interface is a given. It won't
have the bells and whistles (and complexity) of the
word-processing part of Nota Bene.
So what else would you like?
For instance,
Portability
Ability to shell to DOS or
otherwise run external programs, as now (I don't know
if this is automatically included)
Ability to handle files
larger than 2 MB (this probably is already included)
Then I need to find out how
many of us would be willing to put up what kind
of
money. No commitments at this exploratory stage, but
what is the approximate
max you'd be comfortable in
paying for each thing? As an example, here's my
own
list (don't let my large dollar amount scare you off
from making much smaller estimates):
1. Basic features (listed
above): $2000
2. Ability to shell to DOS or
otherwise run external programs additional $500
3. Ability to handle files
larger than 2 MB: additional $100
4. Portability: 0
Hopefully, there will be
enough people who are willing to put in, say, $500
that
this thing can be financed.
The ballpark figures that
Steve was playing with (and he is forthright about not
really knowing how much paid-programmer time this
project would take) is
$5000 -- $10,000.
Personally, I don't mind
paying $2000 even if some others are paying only
$100.
But let's make $100 is the minimum.
The idea is to make this
profitable for NB, to make them eager to do, and to
do
it well. So I proposed that they would be able to sell
the resulting product
as their own, and that our
investment would not begin to get repaid until they
had made a good profit.
Example: suppose it costs
$6000, which a pool of us put in. Those in that pool
get XyWrite 5 for no additional charge. After that
it's sold at whatever price
NB thinks is best. Then
the first $6,000 of proceeds goes 100% to NB. After
that (if there are any such sales--it's a long shot),
the proceeds of sales are
split 50-50 between NB and
those in the pool, until we got our money back.
If we
ever get all our investment back, the proceeds of
subsequent sales go
100% to NB.
Frankly, it is unlikely that
we'd ever get our money back. I'm viewing the
money
I'll put in as paying for the product, XyWrite 5.
Again, this is just to feel
out the possibilities. Absolutely no commitment
at
this early stage.
But the urgency mentioned in
the header is real: their programmer has some
free
time NOW. (The programmer is a guy named Sam, not Dave
Erickson,
who's too expensive for us.) So please
reply immediately.
Regards,
Harry