JOHNBARNES@ENH.NIST.GOV (01/10/90)
As a heavy user of Tempus II and the Universal Item selector I have been plagued by the following problems: 1). Tempus' Item Selector, while it was great when first introduced, has been supplanted by Universal or, to a lesser extent, the built-in item selector under TOS 1.4. Could we get the Tempus people to abandon their item selector or at least provide a configuration option that allows use of whatever happens to be resident in the system, as the new WordPerfect does? With the Tempus item selector one has to take extra steps to get past 6 logical drives. Universal provides capabilities like delete, copy, rename, format, print, touch, ....which are very handy when doing editing. While it is true that the UIS can always be brought up as a desk accessory it would seem very convenient to also have it available for loads, block saves, etc. 2) Tempus' scroll bars interact with the scroll bars and buttons on UIS such that any UIS item that happens to overlay a Tempus scroll bar fails to function. This can create a serious problem if the horizontal scroll bar for an active window happens to lie beneath the "Cancel" button on the UIS. I have seen this problem in TOS 1.4 and TOS 1.2. Has anyone else seen it? This seems to imply that Tempus replaces certain GEM functions in a non-standard manner, which is greatly to be deprecated. 3) Tempus does not provide hot-key reminders on its drop-down menus. This would be a really nice feature to have because Tempus does make effective use of hot-keys. I recognize that the fact that Tempus' key bindings are user-selectable may be a problem but it would seem to me that the text strings for the menu entries could be rewritten when Tempus recompiles its bindings. Since Tempus does not use a separate resource file to hold data for menus and the like this would mean modifying the executable image of the program, which should not be too difficult. 4). Perhaps the Tempus developers could also provide online help via the Help Key. Tempus II is by far the most satisfactory line-oriented editing program that I have used on the ST. I would hope that its developer would be responsive to these very minor problems. I would gladly pay another $25 or 30 for an upgrade to enhance the value of this fine program. If anyone out there in Net-Land has contacts with the Tempus developers I would appreciate it if they could forward this to the responsible people. I do not find it useful to take problems like these to Michtron, the US distributor. Please keep me posted via E-Mail on anything that develops out of this message. I would be interested in other folks' reactions to these suggestions in the spirit of evolving sound standards for the development of a coherent "look and feel" for ST applications programs.