info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/21/84)
From: Macintosh Evaluation Project <MAC%upenn-1100.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Filevision is an interesting new approach to the design of a small-scale
database management program. It takes advantage of many of the graphic
capabilities of the Macintosh to offer the user new approaches to the
organization and selection of data. However, its scale and overall capa-
bilities suffer from certain limitations which keep the program from being
as good as it could be.
In Filevision, all operations are performed upon a "drawing file",
which holds one picture, plus any underlying textual information about the
picture's components ("objects"). Each object is categorized as being
of a specific "type", and the assignment of the object's type also defines
the nature of the textual data which may be stored about the object. In
Filevision, when a type is defined by the user, so are the data fields to
be used for the objects of that type.
A drawing file requires 4-132K on a Macintosh floppy, and may hold
up to 999 objects. Each object, in turn, can be of any of 16 types. One
type, called "Background", is partly pre-defined; the other fifteen are
created by the user. Each type can contain up to thirty named data fields,
with a maximum name length of 15 characters and a maximum content length
of 2000 bytes, summed over all the fields within a type. The data fields
associated with a type are stored on a "data form", which allows the user
to organize the various fields both for screen viewing and for hard-copy
reporting.
An object is not only tied to the entries on the data form of its type,
but also to its pictorial form. Each object has a drawing, using up to
100 points, which is displayed as a part of the drawing file's overall
picture. The creation of object pictures uses many of the techniques
that users familiar with MacPaint or MacDraw will recognize: lines,
rectangles, squares, ovals, and the like are created by selecting the
appropriate tool icon and drawing with the mouse. Lines may be of three
shades (black, white, and grey), and five thicknesses, including non-
existent. Shapes may be filled with any of 19 shadings, or may have
no shading.
An object may also be built up from smaller pieces, termed "elements",
which are created in the same manner. Elements can be bound together or
disconnected via menu choices. Text strings, such as labels that
are to be displayed with the picture, are added to objects in this manner.
Text strings may use the usual assortment of fonts, styles, and sizes.
Another way to create an object is via the program's Symbol Editor, a
well-designed tool that is one of Filevision's finest features. A new
drawing file comes with a selection of twenty pre-defined symbols which
may be placed in a drawing. The user may edit any or all of these in a
mode similar to MacPaint's FatBits. The Symbol Editor is wholly mouse-
controlled, and includes pushbuttons which allow symbols to be rotated,
moved left or right, and color-inverted. Symbols may be up to sixteen
pixels in each dimension.
The critical problem in any database system is, of course, the time
consumed during data entry. With Filevision, this problem is, to some
extent, compounded. The user must begin by defining each of the general
types to be contained in a drawing file by setting up the data form for
each type on a field-by-field basis. Fields can be added, deleted, moved,
and changed in size under mouse control, but the process is still a slow
one.
Once the types have been defined, the user then begins to add the objects
to the file. Each object must have both a picture and a type, though these
may be entered in any order; an object's type may also be changed at any
time, though data may be lost when this is done. It is in the pictorial
definition of objects that Filevision becomes most problematic: by offering
the user a wide range of graphics capabilities, the program tempts the user
to spend countless hours in refining the visual appearance of each object.
While this has always been a critical feature of the Macintosh's appeal,
it's important to recognize that it can also be an incredibly time-
intensive process. The program's manual encourages this approach by using
numerous examples that, while not "professional-quality" art, clearly took
a fair amount of time and energy to produce.
Since the program only comes with two pre-defined drawing files (the
"wine cellar" example prominently featured in their advertising, and a
"US Map" example with information about each state), it's clear that one
potential spinoff industry will be the development and sale of general
drawing file forms for use in various environments. If a set of these
had been included with the program, its value would have been greatly enhanced.
Once information has been stored in a drawing file, the user has a number
of mechanisms available to process the data, either visually or textually.
The mouse can be used to select an object of any type, and the user may
then click on the "INFO" button to view the attached data form. Once
an object has been selected, buttons labelled "NEXT" and "PREV" allow
rapid switching to other objects (either in pictorial or data-form mode)
of the same type.
The user may also have the program make a certain type of object visible,
but not selectable. At the type level, the user may also highlight all
the objects of that type, show only those of the selected type, or "hide"
them (remove them from the pictorial display without deleting their data
forms).
Highlighting may also be used in conjunction with the program's search
capabilities. Here, the user first selects a type of object, and then
selects the "Highlight Some..." menu entry. A selection screen is shown
which allows the user to choose up to four of the type's data fields for
use in searching. Numeric and alphanumeric comparisons are possible, and
the program includes special search characters for the latter case, thus
allowing the user to specify exact or inexact matches, "any-character"
matches, and positional searches. Once the conditions are specified,
the program will then re-display the picture with all objects that matched
the search criteria highlighted. When such a search is complete, the user
is then also allowed to perform a number of editing operations on the
entire group of selected objects.
One problem with the program is that the dependence on the mouse as
the prime input device (per Apple's own specifications, of course) can make
the specification of search conditions an unnecessarily lengthy process.
For each of up to four search conditions, the user must click at least
three different buttons before entering the string to be used in comparisons.
If the field is not one of the five used in the last search, an entirely
separate screen must be used to select the desired search fields before
the condition(s) can be specified. One wishes for the option of entering
such data in an old-fashioned, non-mnemonic, typed format.
Search speed is also a problem. To paraphrase from the manual, the time
needed for a search depends on where the program must look for the needed
information. Generally, a search for an object's name (the only data field
which must exist for an object), or for numeric data or character strings
of no more than 4 characters (i.e., one-word data), can be done without
requiring the program to read data from the disk, and is thus faster than
searches which need data to be brought in from disk. The manual suggests
that data forms be designed to take advantage of this, by storing key data
in a short format whenever possible.
From the limited testing done, using the sample drawing files provided
with the program, search time is reasonable but not exceptionally quick
when single-condition searches on a small drawing file are performed. One
suspects that complex searches on a large file will not be completed at a
rate that will please many users (especially those who have mistakenly
come to believe that computers always respond instantaneously, a view that
the Mac tends to foster in some ways), but this remains to be tested.
The program also has four varieties of printing capability. The current
screen can be printed with a single menu selection. Another choice allows
the user to print all data about a single object, a previously selected group
of objects, or all objects of a selected type. Print formats for this mode
allow specification of headers and footers, sequencing of printout by the
content of any one data field, and an option allowing each object to be
printed on a separate page.
The third choice for printout is similar to its predecessor, but allows the
user to control which of the data fields will be printed, and in what
position on the page. Using the mouse, the various data fields are laid
out to form a mockup of the report. Data within selected fields may be
centered or justified to either margin of the field's print area. As
before, the user may specify the header and footer lines.
A final form of printout offered by Filevision is the printing of mailing
labels. Again, the user creates a mockup layout, selecting the fields to
be printed and their position and length with the mouse. One excellent
feature here is that the program surrounds the layout area with rulers to
ensure that the user won't go beyond the actual size of the label.
One final feature of Filevision worth noting is its "Link" capability.
Every object in a drawing file has in its associated data form a "link"
field, in which the user may specify the name of another drawing file.
When an object that has such a specification is later selected, the user
is then able to click on a "LINK" button, which causes the new file to be
displayed; the user can use the "Return To..." menu selection to go back
to the original file. However, the program is capable of only one level
of memory, so multiple cross-referencing is not easy. This is unfortunate,
as the most obvious use of this feature would be for attaching the front,
top, and side views of a single item.
A critical flaw in this program is its lack of well-developed links to
other Macintosh applications. While it does offer the standard "Apple"
menu access to the Clipboard and Scrapbook, it is unclear how fully this
interface has been developed. In any case, there is no mechanism by which
the user can store any of the reports on disk, for later processing by
another program. Similarly, there is a need to transfer pictures between
Filevision and MacPaint/MacDraw which seems unfulfilled. Finally, and most
important, the program lacks any means for the user to prepare a text file
to be read in as objects are being added to the drawing file; there is no
reason why such material should not be prepared in advance using some form
of text editor, instead of via the program's own interface.
Another problem is that the manufacturer has chosen to use the "Master
Disk" mechanism of copy protection. This necessitates the insertion of
the original program disk each time the program is started, which can be
extremely annoying if the user possesses a hard disk, since it totally
eliminates the speed advantages of that device.
Overall, the program is a good one, but its capabilities are sufficiently
limited that this reviewer finds it hard to think of a situation where the
time expenditure in developing a drawing file would be justified, especially
given the constraints on amount of data and number of objects per file.
--David M. Axler
University of Pennsylvania