Wolfgang_Naegeli.ED_TSRS@QM01.CTD.ORNL.GOV (Wolfgang Naegeli) (02/16/90)
Subject: Time: 4:06 PM OFFICE MEMO High School Writing Lab Summary Date: 2/15/90 I promised to summarize the responses to my question, which Mac word processor would be well suited for a writing skills laboratory and give acceptable performance if multi-launched simultaneously by 20 users from a single AppleShare server. The majority of the respondents recommended WriteNow, which had been my own inclination based on a review of the literature. Primary reasons given: * It is mean and lean--very tightly written, so its fast and small. * Very easy to learn but powerful. * Has everything needed for student papers, including good, easy to use footnoting; no unnecessary bells and whistles that might distract students' attention. * Requires least effort to learn the machanics, students can concentrate on content. * Very fast spelling checker with nice user interface. * Version 2.2 comes with a 1.4 million word Thesaurus. Not clear yet what that means for performance, but a good resource for a writing lab. * Easy to combine with Acta if outlining is desired. * Big bang for the buck: EduTech sells it for $48.75 (1-49 copies) $42 (>50) to educational institutions. If 20 students launch the application simultaneously, WriteNow may save two or three minutes over its nearest competitor in getting everyone ready to start writing because it requires the least amount of code to be read in from the server. Application sizes: WriteNow 2.0 102k WriteNow 2.2 124k MacWrite 5.0 171k MS Write 1.0 278k WordPerfect 1.02 317k MindWrite 2.1 397k MacWrite II 1.0 577k MS Word 4.0 650k Like launching, spell checking is another operation that creates dead time and may be slowed down considerably by server bottlenecks. In WriteNow, * The spelling checker is very quick and efficient and does come with a stripped down (50K word) dictionary which would speed things up. * Students could keep their own dictionary extensions on their document floppy disks. * You read the dictionary in once, and as long as you keep the spelling checker window open it is kept in memory. * The "smart" spelling checker, once run, only rechecks recently changed sections instead of going through the entire document again. Comments about other word processors: WordPerfect : bigger, far too complicated, "the less said the better!" MindWrite : bigger, slower, has excellent integral outliner Nisus : bigger, fast, most powerful, more complicated MacWrite II 1.1 : much bigger, slower, but includes very nice help. Word 4.0 : humongous, too complicated, except easy table editing Full Write : humongous, too complicated Interestingly, no one mentioned Microsoft Write. One respondent mentioned Microsoft Works: "We have a MAC lab (25 machines) using MacJanet and use MicroSoft Works for wordprocessing, spreadsheet, and db work. The load time is about equal to what you are currently seeing" [with MacWrite 4.6]. Wolfgang N. Naegeli Oak Ridge National Laboratory Internet: wnn@ornl.gov Bitnet: wnn@ornlstc Phone: 615-574-6143 Fax: 615-574-3895