Simple Desultory Phillipic

["Carl L. Distefano" 70154.3452@xxxxxxxx]

Nathan:

1. Thanks for mentioning SmartSet in a recent message. The current version is
SMARTS24.ZIP and is also available for downloading from the TTG
BBS. Please note that, with few exceptions, most of the routines work in
XyWin as well as Xy4 (DOS).

2. What a drag to hear that TTG has divested itself of Nota Bene, which
apparently will again travel its own separate development path. As a Xy-
fanatic but sometime N.B. user (for its multilingual capabilities), I had hoped
that TTG would do the sensible thing: make XyWrite multilingual and fold N.B.,
period. I've always felt strongly that the parallel development of XyWrite and
its more bookish sibling did a great disservice to both programs -- diluting
product identity, dividing the user base, proliferating similar yet
incompatible file formats, etc. Frankly, I never did *understand* the concept
behind N.B. (putting aside Lingua and the other add-on modules). Canned
stylesheets for doctoral candidates? Menus?
This was the sort of many-flavors-of-XyWrite marketing that XyQuest itself
should have been doing to tout XyWrite's built-in customizing-menuing-
hypertext abilities. They didn't need to license a less-configurable
competitor in order to reach the academic market; the means to do it was in
their own grasp. Since I'm in a prescriptive mood, let me say that the next
generation of XyWrite (if there is one) should be 32-bit, multithreaded
word-processor, GUI--but with a real CHARACTER-BASED draft mode with
customizable colors as in DOS, at least as configurable & programmable as Xy4,
and with text-retrieval and multilingual (probably
Unicode-based) capabilities as *native* features, not add-ons. That would be
*the* writer's tool for the late Nineties. If XyQuest/TTG had had the
resources two or three years ago to develop such a product for OS/2 (a big
IF), they might have benefited grandly from what should be a significant
response to Warp when it ships next month. (On the other hand, if the people
at XyQuest/TTG are gun-shy about tying their fortunes to IBM after the
Signature debacle, one could hardly blame them. Still, one wonders what might
have been....)

3. You say, Nathan, that multitasking is not one of your "main desiderata".
Being a very satisfied user of OS/2 2.1 for the last 15 months, I wonder about
that. To be sure, having a way of relegating printing to the background is one
of the main attractions of a multitasking environment, and if you can emulate
that you're certainly ahead of the game. But there's so much more: I'm
convinced that just about any
XyWriter can reap substantial benefits from OS/2. Power users quickly discover
the benefits of running two parallel word-processing sessions: The number of
document windows doubles, to 18. The two sessions can be configured
independently -- with different customization files, printer drivers, and the
like. Time-consuming operations, such as printing a long document or saving a
large file to a diskette, can be relegated to the background. Big,
memory-intensive XPL programs -- capable of rendering
XyWrite itself unstable -- can be run in a separate session, while the primary
session stays out of harm's way. Documents can be composed in the
character-based DOS program, with its easy-to-read draft mode, while formatting
can be fine-tuned in graphical WYSIWYG under Windows. And that's not even to
mention the possibilities that grow out of multitasking with *other* programs.
If I were you, Nathan (or, rather, if you were me),
I'd reconsider the position when Warp hits the shelves. Word is, it'll be real
cheap (under a hundred bucks). Well worth a second look -- especially in view
of Steve Crutchfield's enthusiastic comments on the beta.

Sorry to be so long-winded. Ciao and greetings to all. ÿAE