DrBob@cup.portal.com (Robert A Rethemeyer) (08/31/90)
I recently wrote the following review for my company's Amiga user group.
It describes my impressions of the X*PRESS cable information service.
I've been told that it might be of interest to the net community, so
here it is. Be forewarned, it is rather long, so if you are not
interested, bail out now.
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Bob Rethemeyer //"This is obviously some strange
DrBob@cup.portal.com -or- // usage of the word 'safe' that I hadn't
..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!DrBob // previously been aware of." - A. Dent
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Description and Review of X*PRESS for the Amiga
(c) Copyright 1990 Robert Rethemeyer
DISCLAIMER:
This is not an endorsement of X*PRESS or their products. I have no
affiliation with X*PRESS Information Services, Ltd., other than as a
satisfied user, and they do not know I am writing this article. I am
only describing my experience and impressions of the product as I
understand it.
=======================================================================
I recently saw mention of a company/product/service call X*PRESS.
Briefly described, X*PRESS is a one-way news and information wire
service distributed through television cable systems to home
computers. This idea sounded interesting to me, so I looked into it,
and eventually purchased it. It is a strange product in that there is
almost no promotion of it to be found. The service has existed for 5
years, and their Amiga version has been available for 2 years, but I
had never heard of it. As far as I know, neither X*PRESS or my cable
company advertise the service, and when I called them for information,
all they could offer me was a vague description, not even a brochure.
But it is a nice service. Hopefully I can answer some questions you
may have about it so that buying it sight-unseen won't be so risky. I
will go into the intricate details.
What does the service provide? I'll discuss that more below, but
basically you get news and business articles, weather, sports,
entertainment news, soap opera updates, movie reviews, recipes,
education news, stock quotes, editorials, and more. Even public
domain software for various machines.
How does it work? Apparently X*PRESS broadcasts data in packets over
satellites which local cable companies receive and add into their
cable signal to every household, kind of like cable FM. The signal
comes with your basic cable service, meaning you pay *nothing* extra
to your cable company for it. At your end, you buy the X*PRESS kit
for your computer. It includes software specific to your computer and
a decoder box which connects between your cable and the computer
serial port at 9600 baud. The software monitors the incoming packets,
captures the info you are interested in, and presents it for you to
read, save, or print.
Although the software is available for IBM, Mac, Apple-II, Atari-ST,
and Amiga, I am only describing the Amiga version, of course. I
gather from reading some articles that the Amiga version is the best
of the lot, made possible in part by the multitasking nature of the
Amiga. I am using it on an Amiga 1000, so I don't know about
compatibility with 020/030 machines or AmigaDOS 2.0.
There are actually two levels of service you can buy: XChange
(basic), and Executive. The only difference is the Executive gives
you 15-minute updates of stock quotes, versus 3-per-day updates for
the basic service. I purchased only the basic service, but I
understand there is a monthly charge for the Executive.
X*PRESS provides its service through approximately 70% of the cable
companies in the U.S. and Canada. To find out if yours does, call the
cable company, or the people at the X*PRESS sales number can also tell
you.
You order the kit by phone directly from the X*PRESS company for
$108.45 ($99.95 + $8.50 P&H). This is a one-time charge, then you own
the kit. Eight days after I ordered, it arrived by UPS. The kit
contains:
* the decoder box
* power supply for the decoder (brick-on-the-plug type, yuk)
* a 1-to-2 cable splitter
* two 6-foot lengths of coax with connectors
* an RS-232 cable specific to the computer model
* the X*PRESS software disk specific to the computer
* software instructions for the computer model
* generic installation instructions
There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, but no other warranty I can
find.
The software comes with a "Read this before using" agreement, which
basically states [my paraphrasing]:
* You may not redistribute the X*PRESS information in any way,
to anyone, under any circumstances. You can manipulate the
information any way you like, but it must be for your use only.
* No unauthorized use of services allowed.
* X*PRESS is not liable for transmission errors, interruptions, etc.
* No warranties expressed, implied, etc...
Seems reasonable to me.
The decoder is an "InfoCipher 1000R Data Receiver" made by General
Instrument. It is a plastic box about 9x9x2 inches. It has 3 LEDs on
the front labeled Power, Data, and Carrier. The back has the power,
RS-232, and cable connectors, and a slot which apparently holds a
special decoder module when you buy the Executive service.
Hookup is straightforward. Split off the cable and run it to the
box. My cable company didn't mind me hooking it up myself, but other
cable companies may differ; best to check with them first. Connect
the RS-232 cable to your serial port. Since my machine has only one
serial port, I bought an A/B switch so I can still use my modem
without swapping cables. One thing the instructions neglect to
mention is that you must set your serial port to 9600-8N1 using
Preferences. There is a toll-free customer service number if you have
problems.
The Amiga software was written by one Len Schiedel of Chiazz-Page
Systems. This is not just clone-ported software; it is very well
Amigatized. All the menu functions have keyboard alternates, and all
browsing can be controlled using just the cursor, shift, control, and
delete keys, or by using the mouse. The file requesters are the
nicest I have seen. It's also very stable- in several weeks of
continuous use, I have not yet had a guru that I can attribute to it.
And it's still at version 1.0!
There are actually three programs on the X*PRESS Amiga disk: Xchange,
Viewer, and Xfer. They all run from either the Workbench or a CLI.
Xchange is the program which runs in the background and captures the
packets. It co-exists very nicely in the multitasking environment,
and doesn't eat much CPU time, even though the serial port data is
coming in at 9600 baud. When you start Xchange, you tell it how much
memory it should use to store articles. I was a bit disappointed in
this because I thought it was going to write the articles directly to
disk. You can do that yourself manually, but it's not the same. But
I suspect this is how the program is able to keep up with 9600 baud
and not use too much CPU time. Fortunately, the data is stored in
memory in compressed format. How much memory you should use depends
on how many articles you expect to receive. I give it 500 Kbytes,
which will hold about 200 articles (plenty). When it runs out of
memory, it simply stops accepting articles until you delete some
articles to free up memory.
The Xchange program simply does the data collecting; the user
interface is done by the "Viewer" program. You need run the Viewer
only when you want to look at articles or change your customized
category selections. The Viewer writes two files to your disk: a
config file describing your customizations, and a "deletes" file
listing articles you have discarded. More about the Viewer below.
The third program is Xfer. It is used to capture files which X*PRESS
transmits during specific times during the wee hours of the morning.
It must run it in place of Xchange, meaning you have to shut down
Xchange to run Xfer. I think it should have been a part of Xchange,
but I guess keeping it separate reduces the size of Xchange. The
transmit times of the files are listed in broadcast messages. Each
file has a name, and you tell Xfer the name of the incoming file and
the directory path where you want it written. You leave it running
during the night, and when you wake up in the morning, there's your
file. Unfortunately, you can usually capture only one file per night
in this manner. The files I have seen so far are all for the IBM PC:
the UNZIP program, a ledger program, an employee management system,
and an update to the IBM X*PRESS software. The programs change every
week or so.
One function of Viewer is to display a personalized stock portfolio.
The portfolio is your customized list of up to 128 stocks, warrants,
rights, indices, or mutual funds. You simply enter the S&P symbols of
the desired items, and X*PRESS fills in quotes for them, 3 times a
day: opening, midday, and close (or every 15 minutes if you have the
Executive service). The info you get is high, low, last, change,
volume, bid, ask, and ticks. You don't get the time of the quote, and
a disclaimer states that the quotes are delayed by at least 15
minutes. I understand a separate X*PRESS program is available called
"Metastock" which can collect stock data and place it in files
suitable for stock analysis programs and spreadsheets (but I would
guess it is all for the IBM PC environment).
The other function of the Viewer is to view and manage categories of
articles. All articles are classified in a hierarchical tree
structure, which never changes. At each point in the tree you can
select or disable capturing of articles in that category and all
sub-categories. Here is the complete list of the categories.
Comments by me in [].
NEWS [national and international only]
Business & Finance
USA [includes transcripts of press conferences, hourly updates]
Canada
Mexico
Soviet Union
People's Republic of China
Japan
Taiwan
Oil Exporting Countries
West Germany
France
Other International
Opinions & Editorials
WEATHER
International
National
USA State [from National Weather Service]
(each state selectable)
Canadian National
Canadian Regional
(each province/territory selectable)
SPORTS
Headlines
General Schedules
TV Schedules
Pro Football
News
NFL
CFL
Pro Baseball
News
Major Leagues
Minor Leagues
Pro Basketball
Pro Hockey
Pro Soccer
Pro Golf & Tennis
USA College Sports
Canadial Sports
Other Sports
Sports Quiz
Quiz Answers
LIFESTYLES [lots of articles from USA Today]
Food [recipes, restaurants, etc.]
Fitness & Fun
Moneywise
Family Today
Careers
Trends & Events
ENTERTAINMENT
What's Happening
Movies, Books, Music [includes movie reviews]
In the Stars [astrology]
TV Schedules [network, PBS, and cable]
TV Scope
TECH TALK
News
IBM
Apples
Commodore [VERY low traffic here]
Other
[Occasionally BIX articles and summaries are broadcast here]
SHOPPING [I've never looked at this one]
Best Buys
Shopper's Showcase
Travel & Leisure
Fleamarket
INFORMATION X*CHANGE
Using Information X*Change
Students, Teachers & Parents
Religion, Sex, & Politics
Inside Your Head
World Around Us
Teen Talk
Computers and You
Pot Shots
[Mostly for elementary students & teachers. It has a lame "conferencing" ]
[system. How do you conference on a one-way service? You phone, fax, mail,]
[or modem -in your comments, which someone copies onto X*PRESS. Right. ]
INSIDE X*PRESS
Bulletins [this category cannot be disabled]
News
What to watch for
User Tips
New Services [used to broadcast things to individuals, e.g. beta testers]
Where does all this information come from? Some of it comes from
X*PRESS Services itself, but most of it comes from other news
services. There are too many of them to mention here. Some of them
include AP, Copley, Knight-Ridder Financial, USA Today, Canadian
Press, Agence France Presse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Tass,
CNA-Taiwan, Xinhau (China), and many others. I have not seen any
articles from UPI, nor any from major newspapers. AP is probably the
largest contributor to the News category, and includes hourly news
updates. There are mass quantities of business and finance articles.
As you can imagine, X*PRESS supplies more information than you can
ever use. The data light on the box is on almost continuously,
meaning that it is pumping over 70 megabytes of data per day into your
computer (if I calculated correctly). Much of this is redundant
broadcasts, but there is still a LOT of stuff. One way to trim it
down is the category selection mechanism already mentioned. Another
way is to use a keyword search feature. You can set up two "folders",
which are really lists of keywords to watch for. Even though you may
have disabled a category, if one of your keywords are found in *any*
incoming article, that article will be captured (only with the Amiga
and Atari versions). Keywords can also be combined with an AND
function, so that only articles which have all the ANDed keywords are
captured. For instance, I selected "gold" as a keyword, but kept
getting sports articles mentioning gold medals until I selected "gold"
AND "prices". You can also select keywords to filter through
already-captured articles.
To use X*PRESS, you should leave your computer running during the day,
but you can bring up X*PRESS any time and receive many articles.
Articles are transmitted several times during the day, so if you miss
one you can usually get it later. Each article is uniquely identified
by its category and a time stamp. Once you have the article in
memory, repeats of the article will not be captured. Each packet is
checksummed, and if a transmission error is detected, the packet is
discarded, and a later transmission of the packet is picked up. When
you are finished reading an article, you press the delete key, and the
article is removed from memory, and a flag is set so that repeats of
the deleted article are not captured. It remembers the last 2048
articles you have deleted- more than enough. When you shut down the
program, the list of deleted articles is saved to disk, and read back
when you start it back up.
The number of new articles broadcast is greatest on weekdays. It
slows down during the evenings and even more so on weekends (except
maybe sports). Stock quotes are broadcast only once or twice on the
weekend.
Since the feel of an Amiga program is determined by its user
interface, I'll describe the Viewer in more detail. The main window
shows the current article you are reading. You scroll through the
article with the cursor up/down keys, and go to the previous/next
article using the cursor left/right keys. The delete key erases the
article. Shift-cursor accelerates the scrolling of the articles or
lines. Scrolling can also be done with the mouse. Control-cursor
moves up, down, or through the category tree. When you get to the end
of a category, it automatically goes to the next. The top of the
window shows what category level you are viewing and shows <FULL> when
no more articles can fit in memory. The bottom of the window shows
the current article number, how many articles are available at the
category level, and the news source or copyright for the article. The
stock portfolio is shown in its own window, black on white.
The rest of the interface is accomplished by menu items and
requesters. Here is a list the menu items [with comments].
PROJECT
About X*PRESS [usual stuff, plus running memory and packet statistics]
Load
Stories [loads stories from a saved file, just as if they were captured]
Config
Save
Append story [saves story as a regular text file]
Save story as [ditto]
Save config [saves category selections]
Save portfolio [saves stocks and quotes as a regular text file]
Save stock names [seems like this should be done by "save config"]
Save level [saves (appends) all articles in current level & below]
Print
Story
Portfolio
Quit Viewer [shuts down Viewer, but Xchange still runs in background]
Terminate ALL [shuts down Viewer and Xchange, saves delete-list]
[When I need to shut down the machine but still have unread articles, ]
[I first do "save level" from the top level, then "terminate". Then ]
[later I can reload the stories with "load stories". ]
EDIT
Cut [deletes article]
Copy
Paste/Uncut [cut, copy, and paste use the Amiga Clipboard!]
Delete Level [erases all articles in current level and below]
VIEW
All stories [default mode]
By category
Folder 1
Folder 2
By keyword
Show stories [reopens a closed viewer window]
Show RAW feed [this is nifty- shows the raw packet data coming in!]
SETUP
Categories [brings up a file-like requester of categories & levels]
Folder 1 [brings up a requester with keyword string gadgets]
Folder 2 "
Keywords "
New services
STOCK
Open portfolio [displays your stock portfolio and latest quotes]
Sort stock names
===========================================================================
Any problems? you may well ask. Of course, there are a few, none of
which are that bothersome, and they don't detract much from the
usability of the service. Some are actually my opinions of what the
product *should* do. Here are my main grumbles...
The Viewer opens its window on the Workbench, so you get the Workbench
colors. The text comes out white-on-black, which hurts my eyes. Why
didn't they use the standard white-on-blue, or allow you to choose
without having to use Preferences.
When scrolling text, the letters briefly flicker red-- distracting.
Stories are not supposed to be captured twice, but sometimes they
broadcast the exact same text with a different time stamp, so you get
two copies of the story.
Missing data. Occasionally I don't receive all parts of a multi-part
story. I've seen two days when the stock quotes never came in.
Occasional stories are obviously in the wrong category.
Occasional stories arrive truncated or even missing the text. Since
articles are discarded when received with a checksum error, I can only
assume they were sent that way from X*PRESS.
When loading previously-saved stories from disk, the serial port seems
to hang, and I have to shut down the program to get it going again.
To prevent this, I switch off the data with the A/B switch until the
load finishes.
It would be nice to see a list of captured articles by title line, but
apparently articles do not have a fixed title line that could be
listed. So you have to look at each article to find what you want to
read or delete.
For a service that supplies so much information, it needs better
control over article selection. Some categories, even at the end of a
tree branch, contain too many articles. The best way to handle this
is to use folder keywords to filter the articles instead.
Unfortunately, each folder lets you specify only 6 keywords, for a
total of 12. This is not enough! It's like carving wood when your
only tools are an axe and a razor blade.
It also needs the opposite of keyword selection- a kill list. For
instance, I *never* want to see another article about 2 Live Crew.
And I would like to be able to exclude certain news sources.
An ARexx interface would be nice to have. It could be used to solve
the article selection problem, and provide many other niceties.
=======================================================================
Well, that about covers it. For a hundred bucks one-time fee, I think
X*PRESS is a great service, especially if you are an information junky
or amateur stock market tycoon. It is essentially a new medium for
home computers-- a live external information source that doesn't use a
phone line or charge online fees. I can see the potential for Amiga
owners contributing Amiga articles and software for broadcast, and
maybe even developing new software to process X*PRESS information.
Although X*PRESS is a one-way service, they encourage users to write
them at the address below to communicate questions, comments, and
suggestions about the software, service, or content, or to contribute
software.
Here's how to contact the X*PRESS folks:
Sales/information number: 800-7PCNEWS (800-772-6397)
X*PRESS Information Services, Ltd.
Regency Plaza One
4643 S. Ulster Street, Suite 340
Denver, CO 80237
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