Re: Describe vs XyWrite

["John Gordon" jgordon@xxxxxxxx]

On Mon, 19 Jun 1995 08:43:15 -0500 (CDT), Harmon F Seaver
 wrote:

>  Of course, nothing beats XY in the speed department -- although I have to
>wonder at your results, especially considering that AmiPro/2 did so well in
>your test when one of the major complaints I see posted to the net
>continually is that AmiPro is incredibly slow, compared to others like
>Describe, etc.
>  One might also note that speed is not the only consideration at this
>point -- XY's inability to cope with a lot of our newer work habits -- long
>file and directory names, pen input and gesture recognition, voice input,
>direct graphic input, etc. -- is a major problem that only grows larger as
>time goes by, and thus, of course, draws many of us towards a native OS/2 wp
>despite our love for XY.
>
Harmon,

I agree about speed not being the only issue. But one thing that
has puzzled me now that I have experience of several 32 bit OS/2
word processors is the loss of speed. Moving to this higher
level of operating does not appear to bring speed benefits.
Maybe the apps need to be more carefully written, I don't know.
Despite Describe being described as fast I was shocked the first
time I used it. It is noticeably slower than XyWrite for Windows
for keyboard input in graphics mode. But I guess you get used to
it. When I think back a few years, I remember being shocked at
how slow XyWin was compared to III+, and how slow OS/2 was
compared to DesqView. The moral is that power gained is bought
with speed lost.

On AmiPro, yes, those times are correct. I did the test several
times and on two different machines. The results were
consistent. I think people using AP/2 who complain about the
speed are using 3.0 rather than 3.0b. AP/2 is noticeably slower
than Describe on some things (response to macros, for instance),
but not much. Maybe Describe excels on large files and graphics
and AmiPro bogs down with these. I rarely use graphics and the
largest file I would normally use is about 600KB. I recall
someone complaining that Describe had problems with a 14MB file!
Can't imagine it myself.

Cheers,
John Gordon

****************************************
J.L. Gordon
Dept of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, W.A. 6009, AUSTRALIA
+619 380 2850, fax: +619 380 1062
Internet: jgordon@xxxxxxxx
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