Re: Nota Bene and OS/2 -Reply -Reply

["Steve Crutchfield" SCRUTCH@xxxxxxxx]

Robert -

Being the hard-core XySter that I am, I immediately tried to customize
NB. I LOADed my XyWin keyboard, and some of the key assignments were
indeed switched - F5 took me to the command line, F9 executed it, and
so forth.

I suspect if one REALLY were a glutton for punishment, one could
fiddle with the dialog file. If you read it, its FULL of references to
XyWrite. In fact, nosing around this morning revealed a bunch of help
frames devoted to importing graphics! This is something NB says will
be available "in the future." - that is, a GUI way of importing
graphics.

The recent announcement on the NB web ite said that a XyWrite keyboard
would be made available.

As an aside, have you (or anyone) figured out how to put the $@$%%@
command line at the TOP of the screen rather than the bottom? I tried
setting the maddenly obscure default as in my xwset.dfl file, to no
avail.

Steve Crutchfield

>>> Robert Holmgren  10/02 12:31 am >>>
** Reply to note from xywrite@xxxxxxxx Mon, 27 Sep 1999
14:04:32 -0400

> I downloaded the demo, and had the same results you did - it would
not
> install under OS/2. My guess is that its a Windows 95 executable.
 
> I installed it under NT, and it worked fine. I returned to OS/2, and

> tried to run Nota Bene, but got error messages saying some DLL files

> were missing. A little snooping discovered the DLL files in my
> winnt\system subdirectory. I copied them to the
os2\mdos\winos2\system
> subdirectory, but when I tried to run NB I got a "Call to undefined
> dynalink" error message.

> This is odd, because the information on the NB website clearly says
> that NB will run under Windows 3.1 Maybe the installation program
> that comes with the full package would work under OS/2.

I don't know about the demo, but the full versions -- the pre-release,
v5.0,
and the latest (9/99) v5.002 -- all work fine for me under Win-OS/2.
I
don't think they need anything more than Win32s v1.25 (if even that).
What
_doesn't_ work, clearly, is the SETUP program, and I suspect that the
problem there
is that silly InstallShield, the purpose of which I have never
understood,
except to realize (again and again) that it's a total pain ITA.
Anyway, I
installed under NT, then rebooted OS/2, and experience no problems.
Well, actually
there's a SYS3175 in PMSHELL.EXE when I close the parent Win-OS/2
session after
having used NB (as opposed to other Win16 programs); but I see no
consequent damage
anywhere. (The pre-release trapped five or ten times during startup,
so there's
been progress.) I even installed it (using NT) on an HPFS drive
(using PINBALL.SYS
to enable NT to read HPFS -- there's a link to PINBALL at XyWWWeb).
Regrettably,
because it's running under Win31, and Win31 only understands 8.3
filenaming, no
luck on long filenames...

v5.002 fixes a lot of niggling little bugs. I play with it
intermittently,
and maybe I'll get around to a more extensive report. Someday. But I
think NB is
a lot smoother than XyWin, and I could probably live with it
long-term. Certain
hardcoded keystrokes are still a problem (can't be overridden by KBD
file,
AFAIK, and amazingly enough the glaring customization issues, which I
think many
of us would encounter in the first hour of use, are scarcely ever
tackled on the NB
maillist); plus NB has deliberately made Speedos impossible to use,
which
ticks me off; but ... I can live with it, when I need a GUI WP. The
real story
here is that, in contrast to TTG, NB wants to do business -- with us,
specifically!
Hey! Unfortunately, NB has a long history of being utterly
unresponsive in the
various electronic fora -- no msgs in the NB maillist, no replies to
Emails,
although they do answer the telephone. Still, they may be pliant under
polite,
persistent pressure. And 99 bucks is a deal, IMO, for a living,
developing,
supported program (none of this dead-end beta BS). I told them I was
a XyWrite AND
an NB 3.0 registered user -- and got socked for $299 late last year --
had to BEG
for an "NB User" rate because v3.0 is dead meat. It's like a bloody
airline: one
day you fly to London for $99, next day its $1600. Charming.

-----------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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