Goodbye Xy?

["Dr J.L. Gordon" jgordon@xxxxxxxx]

Harmon recently wrote about the Star Office suite for OS/2. I tried the
German language demo of StarWriter sometime last year. It looked good,
though it appeared to be single threaded, and thus not able to take
full
advantage of OS/2.

What's this got to do with XyWrite? Well, I've been using Describe for
almost everything I've done in the last three months, and I am really
comfortable with it now. (These things take me a long time.) Today I
called up XyWin just to compare. The files I have been working on in
Describe, except for the new ones, all originate in one or another
version of Xy. Describe lets me instantly import the Xy files in either
ascii or native format. Mainly, I choose ascii, since most of the files
are research notes and have very little formatting other than italics.
To my surprise, the direct comparison of the same file (in graphical
view) in the two word processors really showed up the shortcomings of
XyWin as a GUI word
processor. I admit that most of my previous use of XyWin was in draft
mode (since I had found the Xy3 and Xy4 habits hard to shake). I now
understand why the reviewer (Mendelson, I believe) in PCMag sometime
last year commented on the unfinished quality of XyWin. Now that I have
used a
very polished GUI-from-the-ground-up word processor (Describe), the
poor fit and finish of XyWin really stands out.

A sad conclusion: I put together the following points:

* a notable absence of announcements about the
new product from TTG,
* my good experience with Describe,
* the prospect of
other OS/2 native wps (Star, WordPro, ClearLook),
* my own rapidly
decreasing list of objections to using a GUI word processor,

and concluded that I may be getting near the end of the road with
XyWrite, even the DOS versions. Whereas I had previously believed that
there was simply no better way to work with text than in character mode
DOS, I now could not live without Describe's ability to print any
typeface I want on screen (with any background color I choose), in any
size I choose, and with whatever degree of GUI buttons and menus I
select (from all off to all on). And that's in fast, draft mode!
The final enticement is that Describe is as failsafe as it is possible
to be. It is almost impossible to lose any work no matter how bad the
crash (provided, of course, the harddrive reboots).

How can Xy compete? I'm waiting to see the new product, but it will
have an uphill battle to win me back.

Cheers,
John G.







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Dr J.L. Gordon
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA 6907
AUSTRALIA

tel: +61 9 380 2850
fax: +61 9 380 1062

jgordon@xxxxxxxx
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