markp@ditka.Chicago.COM (Mark Papamarcos) (04/30/91)
I would like to correspond with users of BBN/Slate on Sun workstations. Topics of interest would include: 1) General usage and problems 2) Customization 3) Advanced stuff (SEL) It would also be nice to have somebody with whom to experiment with multi-media mail. :-) Is a mailing list appropriate? (if so, I'm not even sure how to set one up) Look forward to "hearing" from you all! Mark Papamarcos EDA Associates markp@ditka.chicago.com (408)223-1308 P.S. Please do _not_ send multimedia mail to this address (yet).
drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com (05/01/91)
In article <37910@ditka.Chicago.COM> markp@ditka.Chicago.COM (Mark Papamarcos) writes: >I would like to correspond with users of BBN/Slate on Sun workstations. Why only on Suns? Slate runs on several other hardware platforms, I believe. I'm a licensed user on a RISC System/6000, for example. Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center Internet: drake@ibm.com BITNET: DRAKE at ALMADEN Usenet: ...!uunet!ibmarc!drake Phone: (408) 927-1861
tcrowley@DIAMOND.BBN.COM ("Terry Crowley") (05/01/91)
slate-users@bbn.com is the appropriate mailing list. Send to slate-users-request to be added or deleted from the list. I've already added you to the mailing list, so no need to send another message. Terry Crowley
rsw@cs.brown.EDU (Bob Weiner) (05/08/91)
In article <725@rufus.UUCP> drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com writes: > In article <37910@ditka.Chicago.COM> markp@ditka.Chicago.COM (Mark Papamarcos) writes: > >I would like to correspond with users of BBN/Slate on Sun workstations. > > Why only on Suns? Slate runs on several other hardware platforms, I believe. > I'm a licensed user on a RISC System/6000, for example. > So why doesn't someone tell us about the system and how good/bad they think it is, what it can do, who it can help, etc. This group carries very little information, though I'm sure there are many people who could provide some. -- Bob Weiner rsw@cs.brown.edu
dboyes@brazos.rice.edu (David Boyes) (05/08/91)
In article <RSW.91May7182512@delay.cs.brown.EDU> rsw@cs.brown.EDU (Bob Weiner) writes: >So why doesn't someone tell us about the system and how good/bad they think it >is, what it can do, who it can help, etc. This group carries very little >information, though I'm sure there are many people who could provide some. >Bob Weiner rsw@cs.brown.edu BBN/Slate provides sound, images, text, spreadsheet and graphics objects for multimedia mail. Good point: 1) Low cost (for educational sites). It's cheap enough to have on several different platforms. I don't know what it costs for commercial users. 2) Good text editor. Rodent support for the interaction-impaired, Emacs bindings for the rest of us, remappable keys. 3) Good fonts. (minor gripe: I wish they'd ship BDF files for their fonts in the X distributions. I occasionally use workstations that Slate doesn't work on, but that have OK X installations. Slate insists on it's custom fonts to work.) 4) The object oriented graphics tool is nice. Has a minimum of restrictions on what can be done, and handles display of color images on B/W or less nifty color screens pretty well. 5) Bitmap editor is included. Combined with the PBM/PPM/Utah RLE tools, you can get pretty nice scanned images into documents. 6) Multi-lingual text support: Hangul, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew properly written (Hebrew is right to left!) Gripes: 1) Custom fonts. It don't work without them. Even for English text. 2) You can't ever completely exit from it w/o killing off the initial window via your window manager. 3) Formatting is very style-sheet oriented. It's possible to override on a local basis, but it's not straightforward. 4) The conferencing features are a little confusing on X terminals. On the whole, it's a nice setup. It works pretty well on X terminals. -- David Boyes |The three most dangerous things in the world: dboyes@rice.edu | 1) a programmer with a soldering iron, | 2) a hardware type with a program patch, and "Delays, delays!" | 3) a user with an idea.
forsdick@DIAMOND.BBN.COM ("Harry Forsdick") (05/08/91)
Sam, Absolutely: BBN/Slate runs on: o Sun (3, 386i, 4, SPARC) o IBM (RISC System/6000) o DEC (DECstation, VAXstation (Ultrix)) In fact, this message will go to you as multimedia mail, from my Sun 3 to your RISC System/6000. The people on the mmm-people list will get it as text mail. Regards, Harry ******************************************** * * image -- Cannot represent as text. * ********************************************
J.Crowcroft@CS.UCL.AC.UK (Jon Crowcroft) (05/10/91)
>So why doesn't someone tell us about the system and how good/bad they think it >is, what it can do, who it can help, etc. This group carries very little >information, though I'm sure there are many people who could provide some. Bob, okay - it is very good - a lot of our people here use it as a standard multi-media document editor, as it is better than a lot of products at that, and becuase they can then exchange the documents at source level, instead of struggling with different postscripts, which is what most other sysatems reduce one to:-( I dont use it much myself except as part of our research environment, as I have a sun 3/50 (i gave all my projects sparcstations to my researchers, because they do the real work)... we only recently got the X based verion installed centrally, so i will be able to run it on a solbourne with output on my 3/50 - i'll let people know if its acceptable... the guy who uses it most (apart from the PODA project here) is probably mike hewetson (mjh@cs.ucl.ac.uk) who is usually pretty helpful if you want more 'naive user' feedback... jon
lantz@Vicor.COM (Keith Lantz) (05/11/91)
>> Date: 8 May 91 04:14:20 GMT >> From: decwrl!rice.edu!brazos.rice.edu!dboyes (David Boyes) >> Organization: Rice University, Houston, Texas >> Subject: Re: BBN/Slate users? >> References: <37910@ditka.Chicago.COM>, <725@rufus.UUCP>, <RSW.91May7182512@delay.cs.brown.EDU> >> Sender: mmm-people-request@ISI.EDU >> To: mmm-people@ISI.EDU >> >> ... >> >> On the whole, it's a nice setup. It works pretty well on X >> terminals. This is not our experience. With NCD16's with 2.5 MB each performance simply isn't acceptable. Perhaps you are using a "better" X terminal, or an NCD configured differently? While we're at it, does anyone have any experience with two erstwhile competitors of Slate, namely, Clarity's Rapport and Applix's Asterix (a successor to Alis)? I've seen a demo of Asterix and have all the Rapport literature, but no real experience with either. Keith A. Lantz Voice: +1 415-324-8073 VICOR Inc. FAX: +1 415-324-1408 525 University Ave., Suite 1307 E-mail: lantz@vicor.com Palo Alto, CA 94301
lantz@Vicor.COM (Keith Lantz) (05/11/91)
>> okay - it is very good - a lot of our people here use it as a standard >> multi-media document editor, as it is better than a lot of products at >> that, and becuase they can then exchange the documents at source >> level, instead of struggling with different postscripts, which is >> what most other sysatems reduce one to:-( Well, as my buddies at BBN could tell you, I've been something of a fan of Slate for years (primarily for its teleconferencing abilities, and most recently for its spreadsheets), BUT... now that I'm in the business of recommending things like this to clients (VICOR is a systems engineering firm) I must say Slate and its prospective competitors are hard sells. It would certainly help, for example, if Slate performed as well as Framemaker on X terminals--as I already suggested in my previous message--or accommodated Bob Weiner's other "gripes" (including providing a Motif user interface (with many fewer levels of menus!) and making it easier to override paragraph formats). So, help me out, Slate users: What do you REALLY use Slate for? And why do you use it instead of more "standard" (and sometimes more usable) alternatives? Keith A. Lantz Voice: +1 415-324-8073 VICOR Inc. FAX: +1 415-324-1408 525 University Ave., Suite 1307 E-mail: lantz@vicor.com Palo Alto, CA 94301
matt@saber.com (05/11/91)
> While we're at it, does anyone have any experience with two erstwhile > competitors of Slate, namely, Clarity's Rapport and Applix's Asterix (a > successor to Alis)? I've seen a demo of Asterix and have all the Rapport > literature, but no real experience with either. I haven't had a chance to look at Asterix yet. Rapport isn't shipping yet. I saw a demo of it a while back, but they wouldn't let me drive, so I'm not sure how much was real and how much was smoke and mirrors. I do know they've missed a couple of promised ship dates so far. But then, haven't we all? -- Matt Landau The happiest cold and lonely guy mlandau@saber.com stuck in the Yukon without a dog.
matt@saber.com (05/11/91)
> ... now that I'm in the business of > recommending things like this to clients (VICOR is a systems engineering > firm) I must say Slate and its prospective competitors are hard sells. It > would certainly help, for example, if Slate performed as well as Framemaker > on X terminals--as I already suggested in my previous message--or > accommodated Bob Weiner's other "gripes" (including providing a Motif user > interface (with many fewer levels of menus!) and making it easier to > override paragraph formats). > > So, help me out, Slate users: What do you REALLY use Slate for? And why do > you use it instead of more "standard" (and sometimes more usable) > alternatives? I'm biased, of course, since I spent almost 5 years as a member of the Slate development team at BBN, but I think my impressions would be the same even had I not been part of that group. I use Slate for everything I write where content is more important than precise formatting. As far as the kind of things Slate does, I don't know that there ARE any more "standard" alternatives. Certainly, I would never consider using Frame for most of the things I use Slate for; nor would I consider using Slate for some of the things I use Frame for. They're different tools, designed for different tasks. When I'm in technical mode -- writing design documents, proposal, various kinds of technical/scientific papers, etc. -- I use Slate because it does the things I want in those materials (spreadsheets, good vector graphics, enclosures). When I have to write something where precise formatting and nifty multicolumn layout is important, I don't use Slate for that. At least, not yet... (right, guys? :-) The thing I like most about Slate is the high degree of programmability and customization it allows. Some of you might recall a while back when I sent out a note explaining how to use OpenWindows scalable fonts with Slate. At the moment, I'm working on how to replace the previewer with the OpenWindows pageview tool. It's a little tricky, since pageview won't read standard input for a filename -- I think I'm going to have to generate synthetic events to make it reload the PostScript file after changes. Ugh... But the point is, I can do things like this with Slate, because it was designed to let me change the way it works. That's not true of many otherwise comparable tools. (FYI, I happen to agree that the menu hierarchy is too complex. That's why I replaced it in my own copy. The Slate manual on customization talks a lot about how to set up your own menus -- it's well worth reading!) I think of Slate as multimedia Emacs, and use it in many of the same ways. Granted, the programming language isn't as complete and flexible as any Emacs I know of, but it's also younger than most Emacs'en. Besides, when's the last time you saw someone use Emacs to grab a window image, stuff it into a buffer, stick a spreadsheet next to it, and mail the whole thing to someone on the other side of the world? :-) [Yes, I just did this sequence of operations -- elapsed time: 2 min 37 sec from the time I started to the time Slate said "Message sent."] - Matt -
malis@BBN.COM (Andy Malis) (05/11/91)
> So, help me out, Slate users: What do you REALLY use Slate for? > And why do you use it instead of more "standard" (and sometimes > more usable) alternatives? On my project (packet switch software development) we chose to use Slate for our document preparation for a number of reasons: 1. We wanted to standardize on ONE set of document tools, to make document sharing easy and cut down on wasted time doing format switching and having to overcome more than one learning curve. 2. It's cheap and easy to obtain if you are in BBN (that was a consideration, but not a major one). 3. We all already had Suns (12 MB Sun 3/50s running SunOS 4.1.1). Although some of us on the project have Macs, not all of us do. 4. It does a good job on the sort of documents we are producing (functional and design specs, memos, test plans, etc.). 5. It's easy to learn and use, especially if you've ever used emacs and/or a Mac before. 6. It's very well integrated with email. We use email all the time. Between email, NFS, and soft links, it is VERY easy to share documents. (Not in real time; we don't need, or use, any of the conferencing stuff). Although it is easily extensible, we really haven't taken advantage of that at all. Most folks run it "bare". I'm one of the few people that seems do any personal customization at all. One thing we have done is a bit of integration with RCS, so that we can check documents in and out of RCS and when they print, the document name, RCS version, and checkin date is included in the header at the top of each page. This is actually done by "bbntools", a set of local enhancements to RCS, rather than by Slate itself. But the point is (as others have mentioned) that it is easy to do things your own way when you want to. We're split about 50/50 between Suntools and X users. It does perform better under Suntools, but I like everything else I get from X so much that I'm willing to put up with the (acceptable) performance, rather than the better performance under Suntools. Overall, I like it. I would be happier if it had more functionality, especially in the areas of page layout and the spreadsheets, but it does a good job and its editor is enough like emacs that I don't have to keep retraining my fingers (we use emacs for our code and straight text editing). Andy
dboyes@brazos.rice.edu (David Boyes) (05/14/91)
In article <9105101701.AA02859@Vicor.COM> lantz@Vicor.COM (Keith Lantz) writes: >This is not our experience. With NCD16's with 2.5 MB each performance >simply isn't acceptable. Perhaps you are using a "better" X terminal, or an >NCD configured differently? Hmm. Our NCD has 3.5M of memory, and it seems to work just fine. I wouldn't think that a meg of memory would make that much difference, but one never knows. If you do a lot of bitmaps, I bet that makes the NCD sweat a bit. We also use our old 4M Sun 3/50s as X terminals, and they work great (we use the Columbia Xkernel code which runs just enough Unix on the 3/50 to make X work and use xdm to a Sparcstation where Slate actually runs). >Keith A. Lantz Voice: +1 415-324-8073 >VICOR Inc. FAX: +1 415-324-1408 -- David Boyes |The three most dangerous things in the world: dboyes@rice.edu | 1) a programmer with a soldering iron, | 2) a hardware type with a program patch, and "Delays, delays!" | 3) a user with an idea.