🚀 go-pugleaf

I just spent 20 minutes with the demo that Ann Arbor Software is giving away
at Macworld Expo. It is a mostly functional version of FWP (among the
missing things are spellchecking and the thesaurus, along with other
features I probably haven't figured out exists yet).

Before I even start this, I want to send out a warning to all people who
don't own hard disks. Don't even think about it. You folks who complained
about HyperCard pushing you to more memory? You folks who bitch because the
software doesn't support a 128K Mac and old ROM's? I have seen the future,
and it is large.

The Fullwrite Pro demo is 753K. The help file is extra. And, as I said, it
is missing the spell checker, thesaurus, and associated dictionaries. Under
multifinder, the recommended memory size is 1024K. That's a megabyte.

If you don't own a hard disk, or you don't have at least a meg, don't even
think about it. 

That said, here's my initial comment on FWP:

	GIMME! GIMME!  GIMME!  GIMME!  GIMME!  GIMME!  GIMME!  GIMME!  

I should point out that I don't say that lightly, as a long time defender of
the faith for Microsoft Word. It is also an initial reaction to a piece of
demo software. IF FWP really carries out what I'm seeing in the demo, and 
it doesn't have killer bugs (and the Ann Arbor folks are very satisfied that
it's rock solid) this is going to be a blowout product. The Wordperfect
folks will never know what hit them. And Word had better have a rabbit up
its hat somewhere....

FWP is very mac-like. Very. From a distance, it might be mistaken for
Macwrite, because it has rulers. Among other features, it has a spell
checker, a thesarus, an outlining mode (which at first glance isn't as
powerful as Acta, but is better integrated and more powerful than Word).
They've installed a picture drawing function that is clearly based on (and
in some ways, more powerful than) MacDraw. It's object based, and it
supports Bezier curves. I would say at first glance the drawing capabilities
are about on the par of SuperPaint's draw layer, with some added
functionality. Maybe as powerful as SuperPaint, but it's too early to
tell. I can't tell you how much fun it is manipulating bezier curves (this
is one of the things that gives Adobe Illustrator its power).

It supports a good subset of layout functions, primarily oriented towards
memos, reports and technical documents. It doesn't look like FWP would
handle a publication like OtherRealms or graphically oriented ad copy like
PageMaker does, but for the most common "desktop publishing" functions --
corporate work rather than commercial -- it looks great.

FWP supports change bars (yeah!). It has a strikeout mode for fonts. It will
autosave for you, auto-backup, It will auto-hyphenate. It does char, word,
line, paragraph and page counting. It keeps track of time spent in the
document, and keystrokes, who's editing it and when -- basically a revision
tracking system built in. It supports smart quotes, floating footnotes,
sidebars. It kerns. It has glossaries, and style sheets, and a new toy
called variables. You can track down things in the document by type, set
bookmarks for quick movement through the document, a quick look at the
indexing shows it to be sane, and possibly even useful (unlike Word's pseudo
indexing). It has footnotes, endnotes, a ToC function, bibliography and an
index. All, from the looks of it, separate.

There's a good reason why it's 753K.

What doesn't it have? Good question. Probably a kitchen sink. It doesn't
have equation processing (AAS said to use something like MacEQN, or do it
in the draw function. It's an obscure enough function that I'm sure it
doesn't make sense putting the effort into doing it for the number of people
who care. Table of Contents, on the other hand..... And that they DID do.)

My initial thought is that program startup and quitting, as well as document
opening and saving, are a bit slow. Not sluggish, but slower than something
like Word. At the same time, though, working on a document at full speed you
don't notice and problems, so I'm certainly not going to complain about this.

That's a quick overview of features. If the program really hits the streets
(and as a measure of confidence, AAS had some Mac's sitting there in open,
"I dare you to make me crash" demo mode, without protection people in front
of them....) and is solid, it's going to be worth the wait. And I think a
new era of WP will be starting.... 

Damn, I wish I had the documentation. I want to know what I'm missing.

chuq