[net.micro.mac] textcraft/macwrite comparison

henry@rochester.UUCP (10/13/85)

From: Henry Kautz  <henry>

Some more amiga/mac comparisons, from a longtime mac owner, after
playing with the amiga at the computer store:
1.  The amiga software does not support fonts directly, or anything like
the mac/imagewriter ability to mix various fonts and graphics.  You can 
draw pretty color pictures, but forget about seeing them on paper (yet).
Forget (probably forever) about being able to install different fonts
in different system disks, etc.
2.  Textcraft, although lacking fonts, does have a very important feature,
that a LOT of first-time users will love.  It has the ability to create 
document types (from a fixed list).  In a document, you can fill in property
sheets, which appear in dialog boxes.  For example, when you create a
term paper, it will first let you fill in the name, date, course, etc, and 
then let you add entries to a bibliographic table.  Only the body of text
itself is entered directed as in Macwrite.  Thus you have a combination
of a document and a database.  This feature was borrowed (and simplified)
from the Xerox Star.  The Star lets you include computed fields in property
sheets, and lets you create new arbitrary sheets, thus combining a
word processing document, database, and spreadsheet.

In any case, SOMEBODY should write a program like this for the Mac!!  
(WHY aren't people writing word processors for the mac, when text is what
the little off-white box does Best????)   For students, I suspect the
automatic bibliography feature is much more important than multiple
font sizes and styles.
3.  Textcraft does use some honest-to-god pull-down menus.  Ooopps,
is that  a lawyer knocking?
4.  The 625x200 resolution of the amiga, for text, s**ks.  The 400 line
mode does NOT work with any text-based software.  In any case, the 400
line mode is useless.  We are not talking about a little flicker, like when
you look at the mac screen at a angle.  We are talking major 
t.v. station off-the-air static, buzzing colors you can stand for
about 1 nanosecond before going blind.  The other customers were eating
it up:  "Gee, neat animation!"  The salesman was insisting that it
was TECHNICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to build a better color display.  Hey, doesn't the
new IBM extended-graphics card do 350 lines in color?  Oh, well, why bother
wasting your breath...
5.  The current voice-synthesizer software doesn't sound any better
than Smoothtalker on the mac.
6.  The supposed super-duper-color-animation (Robotcity) was considerably
slower and cruder than arcade-video game animation.  The best-looking 
animation in the store was not even running on the Amiga, but was the
"walking robot" that runs on the Atari 1030, (!)
7.  No flames, please....