david@tartarus.uchicago.edu (David J Sherman) (03/15/89)
My father just bought a program called "Niceprint" from an outfit
called Spies Laboratories, which installs a new printer driver capable
of printing a number of special and NLQ fonts on a graphics printer.
I do not recommend that anyone else purchase it. The program has several
important flaws, among them:
1) The setup program cannot be aborted -- particularly a problem
because it hangs if no printer is available. Rebooting becomes
the only alternative.
2) The documentation is less than adequate.
3) The driver allows up to seven fonts to be installed in it, but
this requires creating a new binary. In most cases it refused
to create a new one if it saw that an old one existed, but it
appears to us that it is a logic error rather than a half-hearted
attempt at copy protection. This disability is not documented.
4) In several cases it elected to print several copies of the first
page rather than print the subsequent pages of a document.
5) With the exception of a sample 123 spreadsheet supplied with the
program, we have been unable to print any other documents (123
or otherwise).
It is possible, even likely, that we are doing something wrong, but as
we followed the doumentation step-by-step I am suprised that it entirely
fails to work. The docuemntation is so poor that I am unable to guess
what we might want to do differently.
Most of my dismay stems from the fact that a call to Spies Laboratories
got us nothing more than a statement that the technical service person was
out and that we couldn't get any help for two weeks. Two. Weeks. No one
else there could help us, and they didn't know anyone else who could.
As our local software dealer commented, we would expect this kind of perf-
ormance in 1985, not in 1989. One sees better products and better support
from shareware and freeware; there is no excuse for a company in the busi-
ness of selling software to be this unprofessional.
-djs-