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Press references to Xywrite



I have collected some references to Xywrite in the press that some of you may find of interest
 
avromf@xxxxxxxx or af413@xxxxxxxx
 
   InfoWorld Daily News
   (c) 2004 InfoWorld Publishing Company. All Rights Reserved.
 
   Monday, May 31, 2004
 
   Vol. 26; Issue 22
 
   Editor's Letter
 
 May the best tech win; BEA and Microsoft struggle to explain the merits of some slick technology
 
   By Steve Fox
   Steve Fox is editor in chief at InfoWorld.
 
The best technology doesn’t always win. Blame poor marketing, bad timing, or just plain dumb luck, but the dustbins of history are lined with examples of superior technologies that failed to capture market share. Everyone mentions Betamax, which had its clock cleaned by VHS. But I prefer to cite personal favorite XyWrite, a fast, flexible app from the late ‘80s that made competing word processors look like manual typewriters. Ditto the 64-bit DEC Alpha, which had the chops but not the marketing muscle needed to win.  I’ve been ruminating on this issue since reading “
 
WordWeb is a combination dictionary and thesaurus, providing short meanings and synonyms for the word of your choice.
 
In the old version, you typically kept WordWeb a mere shortcut away. When you were stumped for a word, you clicked to pop up the program, and typed or copied in the word you wanted to research.
 
Then, up popped definitions and synonyms in up to eight or even 10 separate categories -- synonyms, types of, parts of and other helpful tables.
 
The new version is even better. This marvelous freeware sits in the system tray (down by the clock) waiting for a call, and it is now much more closely tied to your writing.
 
Mark a word, click on the unmistakeable WordWeb icon, and the program pops up with your word already entered.
 
Click on the synonym you like, click "replace" and it's, well, replaced automatically in your editor or word processor.
 
What's that sir? Yes, good question. The gentleman asked, "How is this different than your spell checker or thesaurus in Microsoft Word?"
 
Well, it's different because it works with every word program, from the most basic like Notepad to the most convoluted like Quark Express -- or Word, and in any other program that you type into, such as your email program or your browser when you are answering email online.
 
It's "better" for many people because the definitions are excellent -- Microsoft Word has no definitions _ and the synonym list is wonderful, varied and intuitive. If you don't find what you want, click on a synonym to get more lists of synonyms.
 
Of course if you use Microsoft Word for everything, you may not want WordWeb.
 
But most of us don't do that. We use something very basic like Notepad for simple notes and memos and load a word processor or book-maker only for the heavy-duty stuff that also requires formatting or has to look very pretty.
 
Many people also like something in the middle -- a very strong editor with macros for heavy-duty text editing, or a basic word processor for simple but decent looking output.
 
In other words, it's time for the annual St Patrick's Day rant about the need for good writing tools, and how poor the ones are that come with Windows.
 
You want small? You want smaller, faster, tighter, better? I'll give you that.
Edxor is not only a tiny download of just 35KB -- no time for a cigarette or even a quick shot of something strong while this one comes down the wires _ it is even smaller than that once it throws away its installer and signals it is ready to use.
 
At that size, you can fit a much better editor and a web photo of the hunk of the day in the space currently occupied by the legend of editorial inferiority, Notepad.
 
The motto of programmer Dariusz Stanislawek on his web site is "Good things come in small packages," and while I can't vouch for the generous young Australian bloke personally, I can say that he backs up that slogan in his software, at least.
 
This thing flies. This may be the fastest editor around. That is not necessarily a wonderful thing, mind you, since we're just talking about a couple of seconds. But Edxor has so many features, some people will actually have fun playing with it, and everyone -- I think _ will find the program highly useful.
 
It has its own clipboard handler, meaning you can have several items saved and ready for pasting at the same time.
 
You get regular features like inserting date and time, advanced features like inserting file names and go to line so-and-so -- and unique features like file encryption if you'd like to exchange secret information, or just keep your documents safe from prying eyes, not that you'd mind if Spouse sees what you write, of course.
 
All right. Next.
 
Everyone needs a program that fits between Notepad and Word for Windows -- between the two extremes.
 
You need a small, fast editor used exclusively for writing, and with no more formatting or pretty stuff than a to-do reminder on the refrigerator door.
 
And you may well need one of those huge, bloated word processors that beautify even the simplest shopping list for the maid to take to the market, and stretch the exercise out to 20 minutes of computing.
 
Do you want to have an actual word processor that is faster than WordPad -- that sometimes useful Windows freebie _ but bigger? What if, despite its size, it not only does way more than WordPad but does it a lot more quickly, and with more additional features? I'll give you that, too.
 
Well, that is, two generous young Norwegians, Torstein Nesse and Fredrik Skeie will give it to you.
 
Write 3 is their modest addition to the libraries of word processors which you use to write things, and then to make them look beautiful with different fonts, type sizes, indents, bullet lists and the like.
 
The program is actually a basic word processor when put up against the likes of Word and Word Perfect, but it is not nearly so basic as WordPad. It also is far more efficient than the free program that comes with Windows.
 
Write can open several documents at a time.
 
This seems a no-brainer on any editor or word processor above a quick-and-dirty application but many do not have it, including the sometimes acceptable Microsoft WordPad, the free Windows application.
 
It also keeps a list of recently used files, a nice touch too often forgotten by all by the big programs you pay for. There is an excellent "browser" that lets you roam around the hard drives easily in case you have lost a file.
 
To some, the automatic reminder that it's time to save your copy is another nice touch.
 
Apart from this, Write 3 is a stable, fast word processor with features you would expect to help you write and make the output look good. Instant bulleted lists complement the usual items like font selection and colours.
 
Write is not Microsoft Word, which is the point. It's fast and gets the job done of producing an acceptably pretty document, when that is what you need.
 
Which brings us to the need for a powerful text editor for heavy duty writing.
 
NoteTab Light is made in Switzerland and is the very generous free version of one of the most muscular editors in Windows computerdom.
 
Truth be told, nothing under Windows measures up to the power, speed and configurability of old DOS programs like XyWrite and Boxer. But NoteTab, an early entrant after Windows 95 came out, provides all kinds of power.
 
The difference between an editor and word processor is simply that the editor is for writing content, while the word processor
stresses form.
 
NoteTab, like all editors, will format text in specific ways, but you get one on-screen font. In return you get more speed than you can use, with built-in and customised features for pretty well anything you can think of.
 
NoteTab is a general editor, good for pretty well any kind of writing, definitely including this review.
 
It handles pretty well any kind of computer code for programmers, and links to compilers and the like.
 
For the more normal humans, it offers standard and unique features.
 
It will load any number of documents of any size. It can show two documents in one window or two parts of one documents in two windows, for example.
 
One of its strongest points is a sidebar, where you can put information or exceptionally powerful macros, like the one that converts text to web documents mentioned below.
 
Just for example, one sidebar is an auto-correction for typing, another will fetch and insert euro exchange rates. A third holds a huge (or small, up to you) clipboard library while another has dozens of text-utility tricks, each available at a keystroke.
 
NoteTab has an extremely spiffy outline module, which comes with a full tutorial and demonstration.
 
It's possible to spend too much time on outlines, which is why they are not particularly popular -- except with authors.
 
But the one with NoteTab works with plotting a novel, preparing an academic document or thesis or keeping track of research that falls under specific subjects.
 
In a unique move, NoteTab will turn any outline into a highly presentable web page with headers and internal document links. It's very impressive.
 
NoteTab light is one of the greatest values on the Internet, and if you are not very happy with a powerful text editor right now, you need to look at it.
 
NoteTab speaks Thai quite well, but with the limitations of most software. You can type in Thai without restrictions that I could find, but pasting text and opening Thai-language documents for editing requires help from the Windows language modules. Your results may vary for a while.
 
And now for something completely different.
 
eBooksWriter, as the name indicates, produces electronic books. While these are meant and optimised for viewing on a computer screen, they can be printed as well and often as productively as output from any other sort of word processor.
 
Their great value is that they allow hyperlinks -- like a web site, only far faster and more efficient, not to say more professional looking. An eBook gives you the typesetting controls of a printing press and the manoeuvrability of a fast web site.
 
I looked at the LITE (that's what they call it, with everything but an exclamation point) version, which is free and can produce a decent, but not fat volume of, say, 10 to 40 pages depending on how many images, sounds or videos you insert.
 
There is a learning curve to eBooksWriter. You don't just exactly sit down and start typing on a blank page like most word programs.
 
The software does, however, come with a short and clear tutorial that walks you through creation of a volume, and there are a number of templates to get you up and running pretty quickly. And the site has a big and clear manual available for free download in PDF format.
 
There are advantages to an eBook over, say, a Word document or a web site.
 
One is that the eBooksWriter is optimised for the job it's doing. The output is much smaller than most word processors -- way smaller than Microsoft Word. It can include far more than text and pictures, too. You can put video, music, popup pages and a lot more into an eBook made with this program.
 
The other advantage is security. You can permit or restrict sections of the book by password, prohibit printing and copying and set an expiration date for the whole book or sections.
 
eBooks require a viewer and you can include this when you compile your book -- and make a single .EXE file to send to friends or associates _ or you can just tell them where to get a viewer _ the Simtel.net free download site, in fact.
If you get serious about making e-documents, you'll want to buy a professional version of this program, but do try out the free version first. On the main page, look for the line that says, "Download. Get the free lite edition."
 
The free version of WordWeb is a large download of 5.2MB because of the huge word list, but that should take less than 20 minutes. You can also consider buying augmented versions at  
 
I volunteered to do this for a local non-profit society, and in some ways it has been rather similar to putting a newspaper section together: setting deadlines, editing contributions, formatting them and then laying everything out, but this time the task also includes drawing up some advertisements and coordinating contributions from various sources.
 
But, in other ways, it has been a whole new experience - and by this I mean the pre-press production or electronic "paste-up". For at work we have a newspaper publishing system, where most of the formatting is predetermined by our design people, whereas at home I started out with a blank slate, as it were.
 
It is a credit to the developers of Adobe PageMaker 6.5 that the program is largely intuitive; and I laid out over 250 pages without recourse to any printed manual or "how to" book, and by just taking a few peeks at the on-line help (although admittedly I have had occasional encounters with the program over the years since it belonged to Aldus, but nothing more than that.)
 
Undoubtedly, having newspaper design and layout experience helps immensely by providing a foundation on which to work. When I started out, I sat down in front of a blank A4 sheet of paper and wrote down the styles and formats for the publication: body text, headlines, captions, secondary headlines, "blurbs" and so on all follow a common style with the same typefaces (fonts) and attributes, so that the book has a consistent look and feel to it.
 
I also experimented a little at first, until I settled on a particular "character" or identity to the publication: it would have plenty of white space, lots of what we call "pull quotes" which are extracts from the stories that help to pull a casual reader into reading the text, and to grab their attention and interest. It would also have lots of photographs.
 
This meant doing lots of scanning and also entailed a fair amount of touching up or restoration of some old pictures.
 
I thought that in today's column I would describe some of the software tools that I have been using to pull this publication together - along with some of the frustrations experienced, as well as where or how I have been impressed with a program.
 
PageMaker 6.5 is not the latest in Adobe's PageMaker stable. Version 7 has been out for a while, but it is a very impressive program that makes laying out and rearranging text and graphics a pleasure. The software seems to keep track of everything you might expect it to, and it imports all major file formats - except for complex Microsoft Word documents (if they contain any Thai, for example or embedded graphics).
 
Unfortunately, most people these days use Word and I found it frustrating when they had embedded pictures inside their documents. (More gripes about this later.)
 
My work-around here for images sent to me as part of Ms Word documents was usually to enlarge the on-screen image in Word and press the Print Screen key to capture the display to the clipboard. Then I'd paste it into my trusty freeware graphics viewer, Irfan View; crop it, and then save it to disk. Irfan View is a fine, fast and flexible graphics viewer and is a highly recommendable download.
 
It also does a fair job of enhancing an image - and modifying colour, contrast and brightness is easily done, although for complex tasks, such as improving the quality of scanned images of faded photographs, I used the Microsoft program PictureIt!
 
This has a marvellous "Smart task fix" feature for contrast and brightness and it invariably improved my scans of all photographs, while I could also easily tweak the tint of an image. I should add that this is also a neat program for creating special effects and is very useful to help in removing dust or other blemishes from images.My only quibble here is that this program tries very hard to persuade you every time to save files in its own proprietary format (.mix), but this behaviour is par for the course for a Microsoft program.
 
As noted earlier, most submissions came in Microsoft Word, and I find myself continually fighting Microsoft's attempts to lock people in by not providing any useful export features, and, furthermore often defeating the simple cut and paste of text or graphics from Word.
 
A number of times I wanted to paste text from Word directly into PageMaker, but found I had to first paste it to Ms Notepad, and then redefine the text and then copy to the clipboard again before it would be visible to PageMaker (or other programs).
 
Perhaps I should also mention that for editing text, I use my 16-year-old DOS program, XyWrite III Plus - and often in conjunction with Windows Notepad. Whether I get text in an email message, in Word or in any other format, I usually cut and paste to Notepad and then save the text (although, Word will save documents in a text file format).
 
I have written a small macro program in XyWrite that converts the non-standard characters for double quotations and em-dashes, etc. to their ASCII equivalents, so I get rid of the last remnants of Word's "illegitimate" formatting there, and then I do all the usual editing tricks that my fingers manage to do almost automatically after nearly 20 years of using the same program.
 
Finally, I would like to say that I have also been grateful for the peace of mind that an external 80 gigabyte USB hard drive has provided by allowing me to back up all my work at the end of each day.
 
This now amounts to a daily back-up of over one gigabyte of data, but having it backed-up on another drive - and also then, in turn, backed up to another PC for double indemnity - is comforting thought as I nod off to sleep and the end the day.
 
- Tony Waltham is Editor of Post Database. Email:
 
Let's assume it takes two years to write plus a year to beta test, then add a year because every version of Windows is one or two years late. Most IT departments are not sufficiently well organised to start rolling out an operating system upgrade until its first service pack is in sight, which adds another year. In sum, I cannot see Longhorn hitting many corporate desktops until 2005 or, more likely, 2006.
 
When does your Software Assurance scheme run out?
 
t Jack Schofield is computer editor at the Guardian.
 
(c) 2002 Reed Business Information
 
All rights reserved
 
 
 
 

   The Record, Bergen County, NJ
   Copyright 2002 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
 
   Sunday, July 21, 2002
 
   OPINION
 
   Of taste, bits, and bytes
 
   JAMES AHEARN
 
   JUST NOW I LOGGED onto the Web, through Netscape. The opening screen asked me to vote on who had the best hair-do in Hollywood: Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, or Halle Berry. I didn't vote. I wasn't qualified to vote. I didn't have a clue.
 
  The day before, I was asked which intelligence agency was most effective: the CIA, the FBI, or the NSA. I didn't vote. The National Security Agency strikes me as capable, but my impressions are superficial, based on third-hand, anonymous accounts. I just don't know. I doubt most Americans do.
 
   Here was an item from People magazine, on celebrities who marry many times: "Christie Brinkley is on hubby No. 4 and Angelina is wife No. 5 for Billy Bob Thornton." More celebrity gossip: "Julia gets her man, for now." This piece predicted that the marriage of actress Julia Roberts to a cameraman would not last a year. "Many are inclined to label the romance a matter of tacky taste." I would be inclined to label this article as in deplorable taste.
 
  Netscape is owned by the AOL Time Warner empire, which also includes People magazine and Teen People and In Style and Entertainment Weekly, and the net browser has taken to shilling for its corporate partners. The demographic most prized by magazines like these and the broadcast and cable media is young adults, aged 18 to 35. They are perceived to be interested in only the lightest of fare.
 
  Which is all right, except when it impinges on the sensibilities of curmudgeons like me, whose first thought on awakening is not Jennifer Aniston's hairdo. I would welcome a more restrained approach. Some of the promos on the web smack of 42nd Street in the 1960s: "Photos: See hot pics of Britney, Pamela, and more!" I have been writing this column since what seems in retrospect the Early Pleistocene of the computer age, a period when MS-DOS was king and the latest version of Windows was numbered 3.1. Long gone, dead.
 
  My word-processing software was called XyWrite. It was excellent. Fast, dependable, intuitive, no-nonsense. To send a column to the paper, I used communications software called Quick Link. It was clunky, but you got used to it. Like XyWrite, it was based on DOS, and when Microsoft stopped supporting DOS a few years back, all such software turned into living fossils.
 
  I managed to keep my antiques going until this year, when I had to buy a new computer to accommodate a scanner. At that point I had to install and master not just the scanner and the new computer and a new operating system, but Microsoft Word as well, plus the art of attaching a file to an e-mail message. Trauma.
 
  I had had Word from the beginning, but avoided it because XyWrite was available and was easier to use. Now there was nothing for it but to grapple with Word .
 
  It had become steadily more complex over the years. It had also become talkative. This was unsettling. I would be typing along full steam and all of a sudden this cartoonish figure, an animated paper clip, would appear in the lower right corner of the screen. "I see you are writing a letter," it would say, in a balloon above its eyes. "May I assist you?"
 
  I would mutter, "No, thanks," and try to suppress it. I would fumble with the keyboard keys and finally hit some combination that made it go away.
 
  This happened a dozen times. The other day, when the paper clip appeared again and was squelched, an amazing thing occurred. Once more it popped up, but this time to say that it had noticed I had banished it several times and to ask whether I would like it to vamoose permanently. Terrific. I said, "Yes, please," and I haven't seen it since.
 
  What was eerie was that it was a two-way communication. A household attendant had volunteered his services, had been told thanks but no thanks, and had withdrawn -- where? -- to an electronic butler's pantry? I hoped I hadn't hurt its feelings.  Word underlines some passages in green and some in red. Green usually means the passage is not a complete sentence. Word abhors incomplete sentences. I find that they sometimes work well. Punchy, direct. Like that one, and this. Red means Word thinks a passage is misspelled. Most proper names, like Ahearn and McGreevey, will be flagged in red unless you tell it differently.
 
  Recently I discovered that Word is adamant about the spelling of some words, like receive. I tried, for the heck of it, to misspell that word, with the i placed in front of the e instead of after it. Instantly, it corrected the spelling, without consulting me first or underlining it in red. It was like a schoolmarm out of the 19th century.
 
  When I typed the name of the state insurance commissioner, Holly Bakke, Word underlined the surname in red and suggested common nouns I might have been thinking of: bake, baker, bike, brake. I had identified myself as a user of American English. I could have chosen Zimbabwean English, Belgian French, or one of 20 varieties of Spanish, from the Argentinian to the Venezuelan.
 
  Word is complicated. I am constantly hitting a wrong key and finding that I am writing in italic, or boldface, or that I have inadvertently asked for a new template, and which kind would I like? What's a template? But I can see that with a little effort, Word and I will get along fine as we head deeper into the 21st century.
 
  James Ahearn is a contributing editor and former managing editor of The Record.
 
 
 
 
 
   PC World
Copyright 2002 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 2002 PC World Communications, Inc.
 
   Monday, April 1, 2002
 
   ISSN: 0737-8939; Volume 20; Issue 4
 
   Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
 
   Total number of pages for this article: 2 FULL TEXT
 
  AN OPTION FOR FAST WEB ACCESS...
 
  YOUR ARTICLE "Ditch Your Dial-Up" [February] dismisses satellite broadband delivery as a bad choice.
 
  I live in a rural area of Texas where there is no possibility of ever having cable or DSL service and where, on a good day over ancient Ma Bell cables, my dial-up connection averages about 14.4 kbps.
 
  Two years ago I subscribed to the one-way or dial-return version of Hughes Network Systems' DirecWay. I have consistently enjoyed download speeds averaging 800 kbps and have never experienced download speeds below 200 kbps.
 
  Many complaints about DirecWay are from users angry over Hughes' fair access policy, which reduces the amount of bandwidth available to those who take too much of the satellite's resources. Without such a policy, the system could theoretically be brought to its knees by those who want to continually download movies, music, and other huge digital files.
 
  Jim Robinson, Madisonville, Texas
 
  ...AND IF IT ISN'T FAST...
 
  YOUR WEB ACCESS article was timely, as I had just fired my Internet service provider. The problems included an extended, bumbling setup; billing headaches; long hold times; and an implication that the customer was the problem.
 
  I came up with a novel idea: Pull the plug on the Internet. My time analysis indicated that I was spending more time with the Internet service than enjoying it. The fury consumers have over technology is that between the promise and the delivery is user friendliness, ease of learning, and customer service. And something that's supposed to be faster should save the user's time.
 
  Jim Fegan, via the Internet
 
  BEST WEB TOOLS?
 
  IN YOUR REVIEW of Web tools ["Browsing and Beyond," February], you rate Internet Explorer 6 as the best browser and Outlook Express 6 the best e-mail client.
 
  However, I find these two utilities so interwoven with my Windows 98 operating system that when these programs crash they often bring down my computer. Using IE and OE also seems to create a much greater potential for security and privacy problems than alternative browsers and e-mail clients.
 
  I believe the Opera 6 browser and PocoMail (
 
  Ever since 1993 (at least), XyWrite 4 has had the ability to append defined text to what was already in the clipboard, thus
enabling one to collect any number of items and paste them together. One reason, no doubt, why editors still swear by this oldie but goodie.
 
  Patricia M. Godfrey
 
  CHEAP SOFTWARE, REVISITED
 
  IN A FEBRUARY letter, a reader recommends a utility called Download Accelerator Plus from SpeedBit. Upon reading the utility's license agreement, I felt the terms were too invasive. You should caution readers about the invasion of privacy that many of these programs pack. Specifically, the DAP software's license agreement says: "SpeedBit may gather contact information and other personally identifiable information (such as username, email address, password, country and zip-code), and demographic information (like their age, occupation or gender). SpeedBit, its partners, affiliates or other third parties may use any Information submitted or collected from you."
 
  Carefully read such agreements and make up your own mind.
 
  Greg Saiter, Delaware, Ohio
 
  INTERNET HOAXES
 
  I READ WITH great interest Scott Spanbauer's online article "The Worst Internet Hoaxes" [find.pcworld.com/22021]. I believe I have received six of the ten.
 
  He left out the worst one: e-mail that comes from "
 
  The kicker: "Have a good day."
 
  David Turner, Fort Pierce, Florida
 
  PC World welcomes your letters to the editor: Send e-mail to
 
  Microsoft has done a fine job with Windows XP. I can't imagine a more useful, stable, and user-friendly operating system. It's a clear bargain. The garbage commentaries provided by Mr. Manes, I feel, take away from the credibility of your publication and may actually keep your readers from advancing technologically.
 
  R. Purczynski, via the Internet
 
  I COULDN'T AGREE MORE with Stephen Manes. I won't be upgrading to Windows XP for the following reasons: (1) I finally have Windows 98 SE working just fine, and I see no advantage in spending more money for more bugs; and (2) Microsoft can take its registration and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine. It is my hope that Linux takes over the world.
 
  Alan V. Wackowski, via the Internet
 
 
 
 
 
   International Herald Tribune
   Copyright 2002
 
   Monday, January 28, 2002
 
   FINANCE/BUSINESS
 
   message BOARD / letters to the technology editor The Nota Bene Alternative
 
   International Herald Tribune
 
   Regarding "In Praise of Things Not Microsoft," Message Board, Dec. 17:
 
  Larry Malkin writes to praise XyWrite, and well he might; it is a wonderful word-processing system. I too wrote books and articles with it, and was struck by how much more efficient, fast, clean and adult it is than anything else on the market.
 
   But its owners apparently gave up on it, and stopped supporting and improving it. When I learned that, I switched to Nota Bene, which is built on the basis of XyWrite and has all its merits and some more. When Nota Bene for Windows was announced, I was  as a confirmed hater of Microsoft and all of its absurd, infantile products skeptical; but I was persuaded to try it, and was rapidly converted. NB Win is terrific: It lets you do things the way you want to, including doing almost everything with commands and ignoring points and clicks if you dislike them, but those are there if you want them. And the compatibility problem  e.g., transferring files between NB and other formats  is solved.
 
  I have no financial connection with Nota Bene. I am merely an enthusiast.
 
  Jonathan Bennett
 
  Granada
 
 
 

   International Herald Tribune
   Copyright 2001
 
   Monday, December 17, 2001
 
   FINANCE/BUSINESS
 
 Message Board / Letters to the Technology Editor In Praise of Things Not Microsoft
 
   International Herald Tribune
 
   I am a devotee of XyWrite, which has saved my life numerous times as a journalist and editor of books.
 
  XyWrite may present problems with footnotes, which I turn into endnotes, but I would estimate I have saved 1 million keystrokes in the past 10 years and improved my own work immeasurably by using XyWrite, as I still do, instead of Microsoft Word's clunky cut-and- paste procedure.
 
   I was given XyWrite by Time magazine in 1985 when I was its European correspondent in Paris. Never having used a computer, I mastered it within 10 days; within 11 months I had researched and written a book of 80,000 words. Without XyWrite, I would have moved much more slowly at the start, learning how to turn off and avoid all of Word's bells and whistles. These seem to be designed to make printed text jump off the page in boldface and italics for people who don't know how to organize their thoughts in an orderly manner.
 
  I'm ordering a new laptop. My old one has no CD-ROM drive but otherwise works fine for my purposes, although it's somewhat aged at six years. Microsoft will soon stop supporting Windows 95, just as if Honda had stopped selling spare parts for my 1984 Accord. The new computer will be charged with Windows 98. But I had to call the Toshiba factory to buy it; CompUSA carries only Windows XP, and they virtually threw me out of their Fifth Avenue store when I asked to buy a Toshiba or IBM charged with 98 or 2000. What will happen when the great Microsoft monopoly decides that it no longer wants to make cars with MS/DOS stick shifts?
 
  Larry Malkin
 
  New York
 
 
 

   International Herald Tribune
   Copyright 2001
 
   Monday, November 19, 2001
 
   NEWS
 
 Apple Users Reply Asked Why They Bought Mac, Fans Cite Ease and Reliability the end user / a voice for the consumer
 
   Lee Dembart
   International Herald Tribune
 
   A couple of weeks ago, I reported that the public relations staff at Apple Computer had declined my requests for a hands-on demonstration of why people should buy Macintosh computers rather than Windows-based machines. So I invited readers who use Macs to make their case.
 
  I have received nearly 1,000 replies  a staggeringly large and impressive number  most of which were thoughtful and informative, some of which were long and detailed and only a few of which said I was a jerk for even asking the question.
 
   Many of the replies did not come from readers of the International Herald Tribune. My request was posted to several Mac enthusiasts' Web sites, and the users responded with enthusiasm. As life is short, I cannot answer each of them individually, but I thank all of them for taking time to share their experience and insights. I will summarize what the letters said.
 
  Overwhelmingly, the writers said they used Macs because, simply put, "Macs are better." They are easier to use, they are intuitive, they crash far less often than Windows computers, and on those few occasions when a problem arises, Macs are much simpler to put right. A lot of people also said that Macs look cool.
 
  Many of the writers said that they want to spend their time in front of the computer working instead of wasting time trying to get the damn thing to work right.
 
  More than a few writers put it this way: "Why drive a Chevy when you can drive a Jaguar?"
 
  Among the many specific reasons, people said that Macs were much better at displaying and printing non-English alphabets and other special characters, such as mathematical symbols. They also said that Apple's flat-screen display is better than a regular TV set, that Macs' plug-and-play devices really work without a frustrating search for drivers (even when tons of devices are installed), that it's easy to back up applications along with data, that it's hard to mess up a Mac operating system by fiddling with the wrong files and that Macs offer backwards compatibility with earlier versions of the operating software.
 
  I heard from a fair number of people who switched from Windows machines to Macs, all of whom said that they had gotten tired of fighting with Windows.
 
  One of the converts, Sithu Win of Kingston, Jamaica, noted that many people say, "I am so used to Windows, I can't change now." But, he reported, "I did it, it was easy. So can they."
 
  As to my observation that there is much more software available for Windows than for Macs, lots of people said that was a red herring. "How many word processors or FTP clients do you need?" they asked. Besides, they wrote, there is no task that they want to accomplish on a computer that they cannot do on a Mac.
 
  "Who needs all those bewildering choices?" they asked, which was somewhat at odds with their argument that they used Macs rather than Windows in order to preserve choice in the computer world. Don't let Microsoft, the convicted monopolist, take over completely, they argued.
 
  I am impressed by much of what the writers had to say. At the same time, my view, as I have written in the past about a number of subjects, is that the advantages of standardization almost always outweigh the specific benefits of a particular niche product that the majority of the world does not use.
 
  For example, XyWrite was the best word processor I ever used, much better than WordPerfect in the 1980s or Word now. That was fine as long as I didn't have to share any files with anybody.  But 10 years ago I did a long project for somebody, full of footnotes, and after I delivered the disk, it took three of us a couple of days to translate my XyWrite file into WordPerfect. I never want to go through that again.
 
  That experience and others like it informed my view that if 90 percent of the world uses Windows, you're going to save yourself a lot of trouble by using Windows.
 
  By the way, some of the correspondents noted that my experience with the Apple public relations people was typical of the company's hubris and dealings with its customers.
 
  In the news business, we generally have to beat PR people off with a bat. Nathalie Welsh of Apple's public relations staff was the first and only press representative I have ever dealt with who rejected my offer of space to sell her company's product.
 
  Apple may know about computers, but the company has an odd way of dealing with the public, which helps explain why Microsoft has more than 90 percent of the market and Apple has less than 5 percent.
 
  The 1999 made-for-television movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" was an accurate history of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and personal computers. At one point in the movie, Mr. Jobs discovers that Microsoft has based Windows on the look and feel of Macs, and he screams at Mr. Gates, "We're better than you are!"
 
  To which Mr. Gates replies, "You don't get it, Steve. That doesn't matter."
 
  That exchange perfectly captures what has happened over the last 20 years.
 
  Equal time for Windows users: Why are you sticking with buggy, difficult Windows? Write to
 
  No matter how imaginative you are, there really are only a tiny number of reasons why people buy computers, upgrade them, expand them, make sure their children have access to them.
 
  The first popular application for the PC was the spreadsheet. It was popular because people who wear suits, not ordinary folks, could write down their numbers and calculate them at lightning speed in a gazillion different ways.
 
  The first popular application for us proles was the word processor. The ability to write, erase, overwrite, move text around and print identical copies was dozens of times more appealing to most people than the typewriter, carbon paper and whiteout.
 
  It still is. The biggest killer application remains the production of words. That's why Microsoft gives you two word tools and one solitaire game.
 
  However, Notepad and WordPad are not the best word tools. I refuse, on account of being a coward, to state what is the best. There are fights almost every night in khao thom palaces on Ratchada over who has the best editor and word processor, and the legend is that a lady named Daeng actually pulled out a gat early one morning to back up her opinion.
 
  But Microsoft does not make the best editor. Neither does the best word processor ship free with Windows, although Microsoft Word may (or may not) be the best.
 
  And there is a huge difference between an editor and a word processor.
 
  Notepad, to pick the common and arguably worst example, is an editor. It is small, extremely fast, reads text in dozens of different types of files (try it) and puts out exactly one (1) type of file - pure text. Editors may have aids to writing, such as spell checkers, word wrapping, word counting. But they produce no pictures, no fonts, no icons, no underlining or bold or italics - just pure text.
 
  Editors are favoured by people who want to churn out (a) words or (b) computer code. Programmers and writers use editors because editors are fast and "invisible," in the sense they do not intrude with any kind of cuteness, but rather mandate content over form.
 
  (Note: I hope it is clear that "editors" in this article refers exclusively to software and not to human editors, who always intrude, but also are not cute.)Microsoft Word, to pick the common and arguably worst example, is a word processor. It is large, slow and dedicated to creating an attractive form into which you can fit your words. A word processor is a great example of form over content.
 
  Especially since Windows came on the scene, word processors have effectively become full-scale publishers for the ordinary Jo. According to a recent Harvard study, most (repeat "most") people who use word processors spend about 85% of the time making their document look good and 15% making it read well.
 
  ConTEXT (the author's playful spelling) may just convince you how wonderful it is to have an excellent editor in addition to a word processor.
 
  Right on installation, Context will replace Windows Notepad if you like to live dangerously. (If you don't like Context, you'll have to re-associate Notepad, not the end of the world. You'll likely keep Context, frankly.)There are several ways you will like Context. If you are familiar with rapping out words, fast and furiously - content over form - there's an excellent chance you'll
like it. You'll also like it if you are programmer still searching for that Windows-based editor.
 
  Context has several wonderful "environment options" that are missing from even the best word processors. For one thing, it can read, and work with, a number of languages, including Chinese - and because of this two-byte capability you can teach it Thai.
 
  The top feature is undoubtedly the keyboard macro recorder and manager. Whether you are a letter writer or a Visual Basic coder, you'll have boilerplate material that you write over and over - headers, signatures, code fragments. Context, like old DOS editors, will record what you do the first time, and then play it back as many times as you like.
 
  Each macro scan be assigned to a hotkey if you like - Alt-A could go to the top of the document, write your entire address block on the right side and return to your place in the letter for example. Assign Ctlr-Alt-T to write your nine-digit telephone number.
 
  The only limit to this is your imagination. Context only records the keyboard movements, not the mouse. There is a full menu to run or edit your macros.
 
  You can set up different environments - font display, word wrap, macros, indenting, etc - depending on the type of material you are producing. You can quickly switch between producing ordinary documents to HTML or more than a dozen programming languages including Assembly and Fortran, Net-based PHP, Perl and Python, and the vital C and Visual Basic.
 
  Not only will the editor open multiple files, but you can save sets of them as projects, and open all at once when you resume a task. It converts text in any manner, for any computer system - Windows, Apple, Unix and so on.
 
  And it is lightning fast - as fast as any of the old DOS editors.
 
  It will even act as a mini word-processor, allowing formatting for printing and exporting of files in rich-text or HTML.
 
  Context is not, however, a word processor. It will only do some of the word processing duties for text fiends and programmers in a crunch. You can use some of the great word processors as an editor in a similar crunch.
 
  Textpad is my discovery of 2000. There are two popular "professional" editors for Windows, and I give Textpad an edge over the extremely slick and useable UltraEdit. Textpad is the closest thing I have managed to find to a "real" editor since I moved from DOS. That admittedly unlamented operating system was a rich environment for editors, which probably will never again reach the heights achieved by XyWrite, Brief, Q-Edit and TSE.
 
  The drawback of Textpad is that you cannot write macros, only record them, as in Context. The ability to write a macro, complete with error traps and Boolean logic, made the old editors into custom text programs of a sort.
 
  All of that said, Textpad is a smooth word machine that has a barrel of help to put you to work writing your book, thesis, notes to spouse or forking Fortran/XML code.
 
  The program comes pre-configured with setups for everything from ordinary text to Java, and you can easily spend a weekend making this program fit your requirements.
 
  Screen fonts (two maximum) and colours can be different for every user, every document type or every open window - and you can have as many documents open as you want, each on a small menu in the program's sidebar.
 
  Textpad is perhaps strongest in its functions and attached hotkeys. There are hundreds of one-command functions built into the program - insert the time, delete a line, set or find a bookmark, load a new file, search for "Burma" and delete it.
 
  Within a month, a program like Textpad is basically only fully useful to the person who has customised it for herself. As she gets used to the software, and tunes it to her own thinking, the program becomes more and more just a background buzz to the true job of getting the words down on the phosphor and, later paper.
 
  With this column, I have offended people who have used an editor for more than a year. They love it. It is far better than anything mentioned above. And if you are extremely happy to the point of ecstasy with your word processor, you may hate next week's column.
 
  ConTEXT is a wonderful gift to Windows users from Eden Kirin of Croatia, who has the current program poop and version for download at
 
  For my own writing I use a vintage 1986 program called Xywrite. It has far fewer complex features and is much easier to use. Imagine if makers of other consumer products, such as autos, behaved like Microsoft. Every time you bought a new car you'd have to learn how to drive all over again. And the new, unwanted features would consume so much power that youd have to keep buying new cars long before they wore out. Clever concept, that.
 
  At least you can shop around for cars, which keeps competitors crudely honest. That's the problem with the Microsoft monopoly and the rationale for antitrust regulation.
 
  Or consider the airlines. The latest proposed merger, between United and USAirways, would eliminate direct competition on many routes. Though the airlines have advertised the convenience of more flights that don't require a change of airlines, the real point of the merger is market power. If an airline has the only point-to- point flights on a route, it can gouge consumers to its heart's content.
 
  This brings me to another airline outrage, the e-ticket (e for evil). The airlines promote this as a convenience - no paper ticket to worry about, just trust the computer.
 
  But the real value of e-tickets is to the airlines. On a few routes there is still some head-to-head competition. However, an e- ticket makes it just a little harder to change to a competing carrier if your flight is delayed or your schedule changes. The e-ticket exists only in the ether of the airline that issued it and can't be readily transferred to a competitor. Some airlines will print you out a transferable paper ticket and charge you for the privilege.
 
  Then there's the latest telephone company evil rate-and-switch. A few years ago, long-distance companies sometimes changed consumer's carriers without their permission. This abuse was nicknamed "slamming," and the FCC actually issued anti slamming regulations.
 
  Now the long-distance companies have invented a kind of internal slamming. You sign up for a rate plan - say, a flat 5 cents a minute - but mysteriously you find after a few months that you're being charged over a dollar a minute. "How did that happen?" you ask. "Beats me," says the customer service rep. If you make enough of a fuss, they'll retroactively rerate your bill, but maybe you won't bother.  Price competition has cut into profit margins, and rate-and- switch smells suspiciously like a deliberate business strategy. The FCC has the power to require phone companies to honor a published rate for a given period of time. But the FCC is moving in the opposite direction, trusting competition (and consumers who presumably have infinite spare time to haggle) to keep phone companies honest.
 
  Space precludes me from mentioning two runners-up for industry of the year - the oil companies and the deregulated electric power industry.
 
  Political conservatives contend that government regulations originate in pointy-headed bureaucrats. But every single consumer regulation on the books stemmed from some corporate abuse and reflects a political struggle.
 
  Yes, competition can help keep business honest, but not in every industry. That's why regulation is still the consumer's best friend, and don't let organized business or its economist allies tell you otherwise.
 
 
 
 
 
   Bangkok Post
   Copyright (C) 2001; Source: World Reporter (TM) - Asia Intelligence Wire
 
   Wednesday, May 9, 2001
 
   Helpdesk: What happened to XyWrite?
 
  I found one of Tony Waltham's columns that mentioned XyWrite on Google. I was one of the very first purchasers of XyWrite and used to get help for hours on end in 1983 from John Held and David Erikson, the original founders.
 
  I have refused to give up my XyWrite 3 but I find I have finally surrendered because I seem to have been overpowered by conversion problems, etc.
 
  My question: What happened to XyQuest and XyWrite? Did they go out of business? Why? Did they ever make a Windows version? What about Note Bene, which bought their program and built on it?And, finally, do you really still use it and if so how do you convert and send as attachments.
 
  Margaret, Miserable without her XyWrite.
 
  Database replies: Tony Waltham notes that he has XyWrite on his Windows 98 notebook and also on his Windows 2000 desktop machine and apart from some insignificant limitations (such as file name lengths) it still serves him just fine.
 
  He adds: "In particular, I like the auto-expansion feature and I still reckon it has the best spell-checking program around."XyWrite III Plus was taken over from XyQuest around 1990 by The Technology Group, which did not do very much with it (as he recalls) but were working on a XyWrite 4 which they introduced just around the time that IBM acquired the rights to XyWrite, to incorporate into or replace DisplayWriter software that they renamed Signature.
 
  Unfortunately, IBM closed their desktop software division in the early 1990s and this pretty much sealed the fate for XyWrite as an evolving program. Meanwhile, WordPerfect and Microsoft Word were duelling aggressively on the Windows platform and all DOS programs fell out of favour.
 
  Suffice to say that if you can find a working copy of XyWrite III Plus, it is still the best word processor around in Tony's estimation, who adds that if you want a desktop publishing program, then Microsoft Word is fine.
 
  But then StarWriter is a lot cheaper (the word processing component of Sun Microsystems' Star Office, which is free to download , or you can pick up a CD very cheaply).
 
  As for the conversion issues, XyWrite is essentially ASCII text and hence can be imported or pasted into any other word processing document or opened in Notepad, etc.
 
  There used to be some XyWrite user group web sites on the Web with macro files and helpful suggestions and a lot of other journalists and others whose work is mainly with words swear by it.
 
  More information and some of the XyWrite programming macros can be found at (
 
  I still use XyWrite, the DOS-based word processor you praise as the basis for comparison with our modern bloatware. XyWrite allows me to concentrate on writing first, and formatting and design somewhere far down the road where they belong.
 
   In listing some of the contemporary word-processing also-rans, you left out one that isn't bad. It's called Metapad, and it is an excellent freeware replacement for Notepad that does almost everything better than Microsoft's pretender. Still not as versatile or as quick as XyWrite, though.
 
  Jeff Seager
 
  Charleston, West Virginia
 
 
 
 
 

   International Herald Tribune
   Copyright 2001
 
   Monday, March 19, 2001
 
   FINANCE/BUSINESS
 
 Stick to Your Word Slimline Text Processors Lack A Few Vital Bells and Whistles The end user
 
   Lee Dembart
   International Herald Tribune
 
   Word processing is one of the easiest things for a computer to do. In the 1980s, before Windows, fast CPUs and enormous hard drives, there were perfectly adequate word processors that functioned splendidly as fancy typewriters. They let you change a word without retyping an entire page and move a sentence or a paragraph without scissors and paste. Isn't that still what most people need?
 
  One of the early word processors, XyWrite, was tiny, elegant and lightning fast, and it still has a loyal cult following, especially among writers. Unfortunately, XyWrite never became the standard. In those DOS days, WordPerfect was the standard, in large part because it could compare two documents and note the differences between them, which made it particularly useful for lawyers.
 
   In the Windows era, Microsoft Word added that feature  plus a lot of other bells and whistles  and it has long since become the de facto standard. Microsoft Word is very large and cumbersome and has that infernal paper clip that butts in all the time to offer "help." But Word is what the world uses, and there is a lot to be said for standardization. On the other hand, do we really need a word processor with more than 3,000 separate functions? Who needs those green and red wavy underlines calling attention to spellings or constructions that the program doesn't like or an automatic numbering feature that ignores all efforts to turn it off? At the same time, though Word is big and complicated, it has a hard time displaying two or more documents at the same time, which XyWrite did easily in DOS.
 
  This is another example of one of the central issues of the personal computer revolution: Can the hardware and software be made simpler, easier to use and less error-prone without sacrificing too much?
 
  It depends, of course, on what you mean by "too much," but in the last few weeks in this space, I have explored this question with regard to Internet browsers and Internet appliances. Though I think that computers are too complicated and should be made simpler, when it comes to browsers and appliances, I concluded that so far, at least, the stripped-down alternatives are too stripped-down. Among browsers, Internet Explorer is much better than Opera. As for Internet appliances, they still don't do enough.
 
  What about word processors? Aren't there simpler ones than Word that do the things most people want done? Yes, there are. Almost.
 
  RoughDraft is a fairly new, completely free  no advertising  word processor (http://www.abisource.com/www.abisource.com/ free.phtml), which are also completely free. Notespad (members.nbci.com/newbienet2/NotesPad) is a free alternate version of Notepad, one of two bare-bones word processors built into Windows. (The other is Wordpad, and neither of them is as good as Write, the word processor that came with Windows 3.1.) Mac users have a basic word processor in SimpleText, which comes with the machines.
 
  I wish I liked one of the smaller word processors better than Word. I tried all of them, writing several new documents and fiddling with others. In a pinch, I could live with any of these programs. They are all straightforward and easy to use. RoughDraft works well with a terrific dictionary and thesaurus called WordWeb that can be downloaded and used separately (
 
  That May 6 front page was a doozie, almost comical. It carried a picture of Compaq CEO and co-founder Rod Canion. The soft-spoken Texan, using uncharacteristically strong language, was describing the low-price PC cloners giving Compaq fits at the time. "They're not flies," Canion scoffed. "They're predators."
 
   Did he sense that, within months, those predators would do him in and usher in the Eckhard Pfeiffer era? I wonder. Our nickname in the newsroom for Pfeiffer was "Crazy Eckie" for his low-price approach to selling PCs. We could hear his German accent: "Our prizes are inzane."
 
  A story teased on that front page was "Meet the man behind OS/2 3.0" (Dave Cutler, then working on OS/2 at Microsoft). The stories feel so old I expected to turn the page to see who won the Battle of Bull Run. My column was about Microsoft's trying to prop up a lackluster SQL Server with a 2.0 version.
 
  Ten years' worth, or approximately 1,000 columns, plus the 450 I've written as a pundit for The Boston Globe from 1995 to 1999 and Computer Reseller News in the '80s speak for themselves. Include a column I still write for The Wall Street Journal's Web site in that 450 tally. Suffice it to say, no one ever accused me of holding back.
 
  A few confessions and observations before I sign off: About 70 percent of these columns were written on a DOS word processor called XyWrite that I grudgingly retired four years ago. Yes, I succumbed to Word, but XyWrite in its day was a better product. Yes, I did buy the Mac as prom ised last fall, and it's lived up to my expectations. If computers were cars, the Mac would be a Lexus for its reliability and elegance. The PC? An AMC Gremlin. The executive I like the most is Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Aggressive, yes, but I can identify with someone whose head explodes when things don't get done. He's got a good personality to boot. How he's avoided the stain of the anti-trust trial I'll never know.
 
 
  Stay in touch at
 
  In the merry days of DOS, before Bill Gates strutted onto the stage, XyWrite was a major player. Most newspapers and many magazines were written with XyWrite because it was widely regarded as the most powerful word processor in the business. XyWrite had muscles, to be sure, but you had to know where to look for them. Perhaps the most unfriendly piece of software ever written, XyWrite demanded that its users learn thousands of commands and execute them perfectly.
 
  There were no drop-down windows, no explanatory notes, no multiple-choice options. If you didn't learn the commands, you looked at a blank screen forever. It's no wonder why XyWrite failed in the home-computer marketplace, but for professional writers who had no choice but to learn the system, it could be a thing of beauty-not of the warm, cuddly variety, mind you, but coldly efficient beauty (think of one of those Margaret Bourke White photos of giant generators or the inards of a steel mill). When you mastered XyWrite, you felt like you'd really done something, given that old left brain the kind of workout it rarely gets when it's trapped in the body of a mere book reviewer.
 
  And, oh, those commands! Learning the XyWrite commands was easier if you made up stories to function as memory keys. My favorite was the SAD command. SAD stood for "save as defined," but I could never remember that. Usually, I used the SAD command when I was blocking off a chunk of lame prose that I was about to cut from a review. I remembered the right command by reminding myself that this cruel act I was about to perform would be certain to cause SADness, both to the words themselves, exiled to cyberspace, and to the author, who inexplicably seemed to believe that it was the finest line he or she had ever written. It's simply untrue, as some have suggested, that a little smile crossed my face every time I typed SAD on the screen and summarily deleted the offending phrase.
 
  I also loved XyWrite's error messages. Harking back to an era of stern taskmasters who refused to tolerate sloppiness, XyWrite had little sympathy for those who did it wrong. If you typed the wrong command, there would be no friendly offers to help. No, XyWrite laid it on the line: "Bad Command." You did it wrong, and there's no use doing it again until you figure out how to do it right. My favorite XyWrite error message (borrowed from DOS) occurred when you tried to save or copy a file in a bogus manner. XyWrite didn't even bother telling you'd done it wrong; it simply said, "Access Denied." The message was clear: you don't know enough to do what you're doing; practice harder and try again. So refreshingly undemocratic! So flagrantly in violation of the Library Bill of Rights!
 
  Learning XyWrite was a lot like learning the multiplication tables. There were no shortcuts, no programmed positive reinforcement, no rhetoric whatsoever. But when you learned what seven times three was, you didn't forget. (I remembered that one by telling myself that seven times three equaled when I would be old enough to drink.) I doubt if I'll ever know Word as well as I
knew XyWrite because, a mere click away, there's always a menu ready to nurse me through the problem. I'm sure most people are thrilled to be living in a drop-down world, and I wish them well. For my part, I'll try my best to get with the program (although I make no promises about reinventing myself for this or any other millennium). I reserve the right, however, to offer the occasional toast to my old friend, the ever-crotchety XyWrite. After all, I knew him well. -Bill Ott