chow@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow) (05/07/88)
Recently, the computer store which I work at just go in several copies of FullWrite Professional 1.0. Since I had really liked the demo version of FullWrite, I had looked forward to playing with the release version. Unfortunately, it appears that FullWrite 1.0 has a few problems: One of the first things I did when a Word Perfect rep came to campus to demo the alpha Word Perfect a couple of months ago was to test Word Perfect's ability to work with large files. Essentially what I do is I start with a short document, and then repeatily do: select all, copy, paste I generally try to get a document greater than 50 pages to play with it. Naturally, this was one of the first things I did with FullWrite. Well, I was working on a 2MB Mac II under normal finder (6.0), and everything was fine (except a bit slow) at 30 pages, but FullWrite crashed when I attempted to go from 30 -> 60 pages. At least it could have told me that it didn't have enough memory to do the paste instead of just crashing an unsaved document. Later on that day, someone came in and inquired about FullWrite's ability to do outlines. After he left, I decided to explore outlining a bit further by myself. What I did was I took "Newsletter" example file from FullWrite and made it into an outline with three main topics: FullWrite, dBase Mac, and FullImpact. None of the original text was used in the headlines as I typed in my own headlines. Each main topic had a few subheading. Again, the subheadings are original text: all the original text encompassed by the outline was in the outline body. Initially, I was impressed. The outlining made sense and seemed pretty useful. After playing around for a while, however, I decided to see how well FullWrite could handle changing the outline structure (and all the associated text in the body). Well, it crashed (deadlocked) pretty easily. All I had to do was to swap the first two main topics a few times, and then swap the third main topic with either of the first two and then the watch cursor would continue to spin forever. Or at least 2 minutes, at which time I gave up and hit the interrupt button. This happened both under Multifinder (with the application partition increased to 1350K) and under Finder. It appears to be a bug in dealing with larger outlines as a trivially small outline (all headlines and body consisting of one line) I constructed did not crash. I was also able to get FullWrite to deadlock on another large outline I created from importing an MS Word 3.01 file. Now back to FullWrite's handling of large files: Although my first attempt at creating a large file crashed FullWrite, I decided to try again. Initially, the document I copy-pasted contained some graphics created by FullWrite. This time, I choose to import an MS Word 3.01 file which only contained text. Using the copy-paste routine, I built up the file to about 75 pages. With large files, FullWrite can sometimes take a long time to scroll, especially if you take the elevator box and just plop it down somewhere in the document. I then tried spell checking the document, which worked well. However, there is a problem. During a long operating, FullWrite just moves the watch hand on the mouse cursor: unlike MS Word, it does not give you a %complete indicator so you don't know if the work you asked for is being done. Note that this means the only way you can detect a deadlock is to wait, and wait, and wait... The spinning watch is no indication of useful work being done, since during both the initial out of memory crash, and the outlining deadlocks the watch was spinning. Aside from what I mentioned already, I also found a few miscellaneous bugs: On a Macintosh II, FullWrite doesn't use color resources correctly. I.e., when displaying an icon in a dialog, even if you have installed a cicn for the icon FullWrite will still use the plain b/w icon. If you changed the window coloring scheme (I make the title bar lines blue) FullWrite still uses the normal black and white lines. Selected text is covered with black instead of the color choosen by the "Colors" cdev. All this mismanagement/ignorance of color resoures is inexcusable since the FullWrite programmers obviously knew about color quickdraw: If you select "About FUllWrite", the Aston-Tate Icon is in red! Finally, there is a non-Mac II specific miscellaneous bug which I found: FullWrite does not allow Larry Rosenstein's (sp) ApplicationMenu INIT to work. So, how long until version 1.0.1? Christopher Chow /---------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Internet: chow@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (128.84.248.35 or 128.84.253.35) | | Usenet: ...{uw-beaver|ihnp4|decvax|vax135}!cornell!batcomputer!chow | | Bitnet: chow@crnlthry.bitnet | | Phone: 1-607-253-6699 Address: 7122 N. Campus 7, Ithaca, NY 14853 | | Delphi: chow2 PAN: chow | \---------------------------------------------------------------------------/