🚀 go-pugleaf

>Have fun -- I'd like to try FullWrite, being just as interested as
>anyone else.  It does unfortunately sound a lot less powerful than
>Word, so far, and the notes about bombs on large selections, etc.,
>don't bode well.  But maybe they'll fix it... others have done so!

I haven't found anything broken yet. Just unimplemented and unoptimized.
As to bombs, while I'm certainly not testing exhaustively, I am beating the
hell out of it right now (what else would you call four open 50K files while
cutting and pasting 20K chunks from one place to another, all under
Multifinder?). It can get rather slow, but it hasn't even burped, much 
less given up and died. All in all, FWP is a lot more stable than Word 3.0,
and probably more stable than 3.01. 

The next release had better be faster, though. If I have one complaint, it's
that FWP is so interested in keeping up the WYSIWYG interface that it starts
getting in the way of the person using it. Some visual operations
(especially graphics mixed with text) are quite fast, but a lot of text and
scrolling operations are sludgy. And if you make some changes at the top of
a document and then move to the end, everything grinds to a halt while it
reformats. It almost makes you wish for Word's "repagination" option. (The
key word there is almost). This had better be much faster next time, or else
there needs to be some way to turn it off for us folks who prefer to worry
about getting the text IN the document now, and making it pretty later.

One neat thing that is almost always a feature: FWP notices when you stop
typing and turns off it's internal timers. If you load up a document and
don't touch it for an hour or so, the session log doesn't include that time.
Nice stuff.

One not-so-nice offshoot of this is that there are some internal timers that
also shut off and shouldn't. If you have auto-save set, make some changes to
the document and then go away, FWP won't save the document until you come
back and start working. I find it VERY irritating to sit down at my mac,
move the mouse, and see "Auto-saving document" come up in a dialog. FWP
really should save it while it's idle, not when I start getting busy again.

And a definite bug. I've reproduced this multiple times, and it needs
fixing. FWP missing mouse clicks and menu-selects. I'm constantly pulling
down a menu, selecting something, and nothing. I have to pull the menu down
twice, and the second time the operation goes through. For a while, I thought
I was just being sloppy, but even being very slow and careful, FWP drops
them on the floor. Not nice. Same with mouse clicks. If you have multiple
windows on the screen, if you try to bring one forward by clicking on the
title bar, FWP will in most cases ignore you. You either have to click on
the window itself (which isn't always visible....) or go to the "Windows..."
menu item. VERY un-nice. These deserve a bugfix release, and as soon as I
get a chance, I'll be reporting them to AT through channels.

Neither is serious, except that they drive someone who's used to the Mac
interface and relies on consisten user interfaces crazy.... Trust me on
that....

I'm rapidly approaching full time use of FWP. I've yet to find anything that
would make me consider switching back to Word. Now, all they need to do is
make it faster, make it smaller, and add some of the missing features (for
me, the critical missing features are paragraph layouts and the custom style
functionality that Word has. Neither critical, by any means, although a
"Based on" style format is a major win....)




Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ

	Robert A. Heinlein: 1907-1988. He will never truly die as long as we
                           read his words and speak his name. Rest in Peace.