DFA has been developed for several years. While it has been a tiny tool, which the programmer just did for himself in the very beginning, this has significantly changed during the program's evolution. Many DFA users participated in the development of DFA: They made suggestions how to improve DFA, wrote Arexx scripts, translated locale files etc.

The following lines may give you an idea of what DFA is today:

Support of OS2.x/3.x

Support of native languages

Beautiful and comfortable user interface

Extensive opportunities to customize DFA

Powerful Arexx interface

Complete Documentation

Carefully programmed application for optimal efficiency

Special features

Support of OS2.x/3.x

• Commodity support, i.e. DFA can be reached by hotkey or the Exchange utility of the Workbench
• The DFA main window is an application window; you may drag and drop address database files on it to load them
• Application icon and application menu
• DFA can be used as default tool for address database files

Support of native languages

• At least Amiga OS2.1 is needed to use this feature
• Supported languages are english (builtin), german, french and italian.
• The french and italian locale files can be downloaded seperately from the Supplements page.

Beautiful and comfortable user interface

• The complete distribution comes along with MagicWB icons, some of them were especially created for DFA by the MagicWB author Martin Huttenloher himself
• Toolbar with MagicWB style buttons to access the most often used functions
• All windows of DFA are font sensitive
• The DFA-Editor main window is font sensitive and resizable
• All operations of DFA are accessable by keyboard

Extensive opportunities to customize DFA

• The format of the address listview and the display part of the main window of the DFA-Editor main window can be changed
• Addresses can be sorted by any (text) field of the address
• The fonts for the DFA-Editor and the DFA-Preferences can be changed
• You may configure a custom screen for DFA

Powerful Arexx interface

• The Arexx interface supplies 40 commands and more than 100 options.
• The Arexx port is available as soon as the DFA server is running. You do not need to run the DFA editor to use Arexx!

Complete Documentation

• Online help is available out of (nearly) every window of DFA
• The complete documentation is available in german and english; a french version can be downloaded here.
• The distribution contains the documention in Amigaguide and TeX format. ASCII and Postscript formatted documentation can be downloaded from this server.

Carefully programmed application for optimal efficiency

• The program has been split into the editor, the server and the preferences parts; by this the available memory is optimally used and DFA often needs even less memory than it did in version 1.2x
• Program code used by more than one part of DFA have been exported into a shared library, the dfa.library
• The internal memory management has been rewritten from scratch for DFA 2.x with the consequence that the address data now uses much less RAM than it did in version 1.x
• Usage of memory pools decreases memory fragmentation and speeds up memory allocation and deallocation
• Routines for loading and saving addresses have been optimized for speed. This means that DFA saves up to 1000 addresses a second (depending on the hardware configuration).

Special features

• Support of external files
• Powerful dial function
• Addresses can be separated into groups
• Network support