XY 4.017 DOS Report

[Tom Hawley TJH@xxxxxxxx]

Received 4.017 DOS last week, and have it installed on home
and office machines (both OS/2, no problems). While I have
not used it enough to give it a good workout, so far it
looks good.

The 4.017 disks arrived with a single page of installation
instructions, and yes, they expect you to reinstall the
entire program. I did this into a temp directory, and then
looked for new files which I copied over to my working
directory. There are not many; EDITOR.EXE (05-08-95),
XY4.DLG (10-10-94), XY4.MNU (11-09-94), XY4.HLP (06-21-94)
and a few printer files seem to be all that has been changed
since January 1994. There's a new PICTURE.TIF (07-28-94) if
you're interested. The import/export filters are all
pre-March 1993; apparently TTG has no ongoing arrangement
with the Word for Word people to supply updates.

There was nothing to indicate what had been fixed or
changed, which is in keeping with TTG's apparent policy that
such things are none of the user's business. The readme
files in the 4.017 update are dated Feb/Mar 1993 (that's two
and one-half years ago), although the install program (which
looks like it was revised recently) says to refer to them
for "last-minute information." While it's gratifying to see
that an update has been issued, it could have been done with
a little more professionalism and attention to detail.

On another matter, I see that Peter Lewis' column in the NY
Times on 8 August (devoted to his dancing on what he thinks
is OS/2's final resting place) has been quoted here. Why is
it that the Times (and the Wall Street Journal for that
matter, although Mossberg has not bashed XyWrite for awhile)
thinks that its computer columnist has to write such
juvenile stuff? As someone noted earlier, it makes you
wonder about the rest of the paper.
                     
 Thomas J. Hawley    tjh@xxxxxxxx
 New York      fax +1 212 475 3002