robb@mentor.UUCP (Rob Bartel) (05/22/86)
After losing several days worth of work on a ThinkTank 512 outline I called Living Videotext and found out that their current version of software (1.2) has a SERIOUS memory management bug in it that causes random crashes and screwy characters to show up in the outline. In addition, it is a creeping death sort of problem, and you can go through several saves accumulating these garbage characters until it gets so bad that the tool crashes. The problem is worse on long outlines (I havent seen it on outlines less than 10K in size) and occurs *ONLY ON* macs with the 128K ROM. I have not seen problems on my (work) machine with the 64K ROM. It occurs with either the old or new System and Finder combinations. Another note, TT512 doesnt work with anything that takes up any memory at all, as nearly as I can tell. DO NOT turn on the RAM cache, use switcher, and it is probably best not to use anything else that consumes memory (e.g. JCLOCK.) I note that the SIZE resource says 491K is the minimum memory size... Would someone out there *PLEASE* put me out of my misery and do a real MAC implementation of this indispensible tool. TT does virtually nothing at all like good mac software should. (e.g. no scroll bars, screwy text editting, evidently does its own memory management, is HUGE for what it does, is incompatible with almost anything else such as switcher, etc. etc. etc.) In defense of Living Videotext, however, the person I talked to there was very knowledgeable, helpful, sympathetic, and honest. She also didnt have a workaround other than to keep the outlines small. -- Rob Bartel ...!tektronix!sequent!mentor!robb
matt@ucla-cs.UUCP (05/25/86)
A new outline processor *DA* called 'Acta' will be out within a month.
I've had a pre-release (I paid for it :-) for about a month, and have
built 50+ kbyte outlines with NOT A SINGLE CRASH. The user interface
conforms with Mac standards, and the DA is robust as any program I've
seen (on the Mac). It runs fine on both old and new ROMs (although most
of the stuff I've done is on a Mac+).
Acta lets you save outlines in Text, Acta, or MacWrite format (with
section numbering of different flavors), or you can clip a short outline
into MacWrite (or Word or ...) via clipboard.
The only shortcoming is the inability to print an outline without
saving/clipping into a wordprocessor.
I recommend Acta without reservation. TT-512 isn't worth the powder to
blow it to Poughkeepsie.
- Matt
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UUCP: {ucbvax,ihnp4,randvax,trwrb!trwspp,ism780}!ucla-cs!matt
ARPA: matt@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU
(first part of original poster's article included below)
In article <314@mentor.mentor.UUCP>, robb@mentor.UUCP (Rob Bartel) writes:
> After losing several days worth of work on a ThinkTank 512 outline I called
> Living Videotext and found out that their current version of software
> (1.2) has a SERIOUS memory management bug in it that causes random crashes
> and screwy characters to show up in the outline. In addition, it is a creeping
> death sort of problem, and you can go through several saves accumulating these
> garbage characters until it gets so bad that the tool crashes. The problem is
> worse on long outlines (I havent seen it on outlines less than 10K in size)
> and occurs *ONLY ON* macs with the 128K ROM. I have not seen problems on my
> (work) machine with the 64K ROM. It occurs with either the old or new System
> and Finder combinations.