Re: Nota Bene

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Michael Norman  on Tue, 28 May
2002 09:05:12 -0400


> A number of people here
> have reported that NB is buggy; a number of people on the NB list say the
> program works perfectly for them and swear by the integration of the
> various tasks. I had no luck with NB's tech support; others report the
> opposite experience.

Here's my take: If you monitor the NB mail list, you will find that NB users
are extremely non-technical, and utterly ignorant of how to modify the operation
of the program. The few XPL programs that experimenters have designed for it
are, well, sub-par (to be charitable about it). They have been supplied with
zero information about how NB works, so I guess you can't expect much.
Overwhelmingly, NB users simply accept all the defaults (the keyboard, etc etc
etc -- everything). *If* you run it that way, NB is probably pretty solid --
it's been optimized for this "standard" use, and bugs within standard operation
have been largely quashed. Problems with NB begin when you try to customize it.
To be fair, I think if we really spent the time to focus on NB, we'd iron a lot
of those problems out. There are real issues with getting some "legacy"
procedures to work (procedures inherited from XyWrite & XyWin). NB has also
changed in undocumented ways, so that things that work in Xy4DOS sometimes don't
quite work, or work the same way, in NB. They don't have the coders or staff to
attend to the small problems that customizers encounter. I'm the first to admit
that when I try to run a routine in NB and it bombs, I generally just give up;
perseverance might pay off, but -- I have other fish to fry. Plus you gotta be
running 32-bit Windows; even though it's a 16-bit program, it is incredibly
flaky under Win3.x -- and that's a sore point if you don't generally operate
within an M$ 32-bit OS.

In short, NB is waiting for some talented programmer with a XyWrite background
to really study it (which presupposes that s/he really needed it, as say a
successor to XyWin). Without a XyWrite background, said programmer wouldn't
have a clue where or how to begin; there simply aren't any technical references
to NB. We may be waiting a long time.

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