moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer) (12/01/89)
In article <30464@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> kitchel@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Sid Kitchel) writes: >carter@portia.Stanford.EDU (Thomas J. Carter) writes: > >>Does anyone have ANY idea when Fullwrite v2.0 will show its face? >>Are we looking at 6 months or more than a year? If someone knows >>anything factual, please post it. If it's just a rumor then it's >>probably better to send me mail. > > I recently saw a presentation by Ashton-Tate's sales force. We >were told to expect FWP 2.0 in the coming Spring. Luckily, FWP has >never been late for a delivery -- so we can COUNT on this prediction!! We're talking implied :-) here, I think. I've had FWP since it's release, and brother, that thing made the B-1 Bomber look like an on-time project... I'd like to know when 2.0 is supposed to be out, too. I've seen two Ashton-Tate presentations in the last two years, and each promised a 2.0 relase within eight months of the lecture. All we've gotten since then is 1.1, whose major goal seems to be selling A-T foreign language dictionaries. Frankly, I've had all the vague promises from Ashton-Late that I can stomach, and after reading Stephen Levy's article in MacWorld on the state of A-T's now-defunct Macintosh division, I find myself with an acute lack of confidence in Ashton-Tate, and a word processor which takes seconds to backspace over characters, and still has to catch up to me when I'm typing on long documents -- and this with a Mac SE/30! I still use FWP over Word 4.0; I like the interface better than anything I've seen before Framemaker 2.0 arrived for the Sun workstations last week. (NICE job, Frame! Talk about listening to your users...) But after all the time I've spent waiting for "just-around-the-corner" updates, all the time I spent writing up bug/problem lists to A-T (once, at their request) which apparently disappeared into a black hole, all the reports of half-assed cutbacks in the Macintosh division at A-T, and all the marketting promises I've been told over and over and over again... I've had it. Some of you can probably remember me championing FullWrite in this group over the last couple of years. I *still* think it's a hell of a program -- the design, with the exception of some graphics placement problems, is one of the best I've ever seen -- but the performance is atrocious, and I don't feel comfortable investing time and effort into a program whose company support is so minimal. I've got documents I'll need to open in the future, and I'd like to have a reasonable shot at the chance of the word processor that created them still existing then. Enough is enough. I figure that if FWP 2.0 hasn't arrived by March, then it's time to convert all my FWP files to MacWrite 4.5, try out Nisus (hey, I use GNU Emacs -- how hard can it be?), or, at worst, bite the bullet and re-learn Word 4.0. (Maybe Frame 2.0 for the Mac will be out, though I'd wonder how well it works without System 7.0's virtual memory.) If it isn't out by then, time to switch the tri-corder off and pronounce, "It's dead, Jim." "But Alex, I don't want to be rich for the same reason as other men." "Not for the cars, the houses, the women?" "Oh, I guess it is the same reason." Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, microsoft, hplsla, uiucuxc}!fluke!moriarty CREDO: You gotta be Cruel to be Kind... <*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>
chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (12/01/89)
>> I recently saw a presentation by Ashton-Tate's sales force. We >>were told to expect FWP 2.0 in the coming Spring. Luckily, FWP has >>never been late for a delivery -- so we can COUNT on this prediction!! Well, when FWP first came out, I was told that 2.0 would be out in the fall [they'd asked me to be a beta tester]. Then, in the fall, I was told it'd be out in April, and 1.1 would be out in December. Then, 1.1 actually made it out, and they were talking September again. Now, they're talking Spring again. So far, they're right on schedule, assuming you realize they never mentioned years. I figure 2.0 will be out whenever it'll be out. Or maybe not; I'm not sure I care. FWP is 85% of the perfect word processor, but I"m tired of waiting for the rest -- I'm comfortable with Word 4, and it'll have to convince me it's worth switching. The missing 15% is enough to keep me from using it, unlike Jeff (I spend too much time moving lots of text into Pagemaker and back and forth to Unix boxes, and Fullwrite makes both of those a hassle). I'm personally tired of searching for the grail of the perfect word processor. I'd rather spend my time writing and using it than constantly learning new command sets and quirks. Word is Good Enough and I'm used to it, and so something will have to be really neat to make me take a second look. When/IF FWP 2.0 comes out, we'll see. But I"m not losing any time, energy or productivity waiting for it. -- Chuq Von Rospach <+> chuq@apple.com <+> [This is myself speaking] When it comes to matters ourside your specialties, you are consistently and brilliantly stupid [....] with respect to matters you haven't studied and have had no experience basing your opinions on casual gossip [....] and plain misinformation -- unsuspected because you haven't attempted to verify it. -- Robert Heinlein to J.W. Campbell, Jr. 1941