petera@comix.cs.uoregon.edu (Peter Adamson) (10/31/90)
Let me first say that other than owning one of their products I have no relation to Publishing Technologies whatsoever. There have been several threads in past months discussing the lack of a trash can, dissatisfaction with the File/Program Manager setup, requests for a customizable text editor, and an .ini file editor. The Pubtech File manager addresses all of these issues. It replaces the File Manager and Program manager with a (dangerously) close impersonation of the Mac interface and comes with several utilities that fill other voids. For those who may have used the demo that is available on cica I should say that they only observed a portion of the product's functionality. File Organizer 2.x was a clear benefit in Windows 2.x. Although Windows 3.x made the usefullness of Pubtech less clear with the advent of the Program Manager, I think version 3.0 of the product provides a superior interface. As I mentioned the File Organizer displays a desktop of icons in a similar fashion as the Macintosh. Iconic disk drives explode into windows or trees that represent files as icons and directories as folders. Folders and Apps icons can be placed on the desktop for quick access later. The objective motif is complete, for instance dragging a data file onto an icon of a running windows app activates the app with that data file. Desktop layouts, including open application windows and icon placement is can be written to files for later sessions. A special application manages desktop files so their use is fully integrated into the file system. E.G. Desktop are represented by their own icon. Double clicking a desktop file clears the present desktop and loads the new one. This eliminates the need for the separate Program and File Managers clearing up the screen and providing a more powerful and intuitive relation than the standard Winodws shell. In addition a special icon driver permits easy association of custom icons with generic files or groups files (wildcards accepted) for display in the folder windows. And yes there is a large library of custom color icons to draw from. File Organizer comes with a fully customizable editor that is not limited by the ~32K file size that notepad is. Also supplied is a (control) Panel program (now where have I heard that name before...) that is a user friendly method of accessing .ini files. This is sounding too much like a commercial... The drawbacks: Speed, some excess diskspace use (to save folder images), and some bugs (nothing too nasty yet) Though not without its share of bugs and idiosynchratic features File Organizer is a definite improvement on the File/Program manager setup that Microsoft has chosen. Flames welcome. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- __ _ _ | Peter Adamson (petera@cs.uoregon.edu) /_/( /_| | Univ of Oregon / _)/ | | "They don't know what they don't know..." - unknown