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From: ace@tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst)
To: TIDBITS@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU
Subject: TidBITS#180/14-Jun-93
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 93 21:33:38 PDT
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TidBITS#180/14-Jun-93
=====================
Matt Neuburg's investigation into Inspiration 4.0 and other
outliners anchors this issue, aided by Mark Anbinder's article
on the Newton and some competition from EO. We also have bits
about the Color Classic, one possible punishment for deterring
computer crime, the correct pin-outs for the standard hardware
handshaking cable, and look at a new Apple rebate program that
will be popular with users but potentially a problem for
some dealers.
Copyright 1990-1993 Adam & Tonya Engst. Non-profit, non-commercial
publications may reprint articles if full credit is given. Other
publications please contact us. We do not guarantee the accuracy
of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and company
names may be registered trademarks of their companies. Disk
subscriptions and back issues are available - email for details.
For information send email to info@tidbits.com or ace@tidbits.com
CIS: 72511,306 -- AppleLink: ace@tidbits.com@internet#
AOL: Adam Engst -- Delphi: Adam_Engst -- BIX: TidBITS
TidBITS -- 1106 North 31st Street -- Renton, WA 98056 USA
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Topics:
MailBITS/14-Jun-93
Waiting for Newton
Rebate Sparks Controversy
Inspiration 4.0: Outliners and Me
Reviews/14-Jun-93
[Archived as /info-mac/per/tb/tidbits-180.etx; 29K]
MailBITS/14-Jun-93
------------------
With the help of several users, Akif Eyler tracked down and
eradicated a bug with styles in Easy View 2.32 that had escaped
detection throughout the beta test process. I distributed the 2.33
patch application several days ago; you should find it at the
usual sites, although I don't know what the exact path will be -
look for it in the same directory as Easy View itself.
**Cable Table Label** -- Alert reader Phil Reese
<preese@skat.usc.edu> wins the copy editing award for the week,
noticing a serious typographical error in our chart listing the
"standard" configuration for a Macintosh hardware handshaking
cable. Somehow we switched the Macintosh pin numbers for
handshaking in and out. Our apologies. The correct table is:
Mac function RS-232 function Mac pin DB-25 pin
------------ --------------- ------- ---------
RxD (receive) Receive Data 5 3
TxD (transmit) Transmit Data 3 2
Ground Ground 4 & 8 7
HSKi CTS 2 5
HSKo RTS & DTR 1 4 & 20
GPi CD 7 8
**CAPITAL Punishment** -- The 17-May-93 issue of InformationWeek
reported on news stories from China about a computer hacker being
executed for defrauding the Agricultural Bank of China of about
$200,000. The news reports said that Shi Biao was executed as a
warning to others contemplating computer crime. Considering the
ease with which computer viruses travel, if I were a virus author
I'd think about other lines of work.
**Color-less Classic** -- A friend at Apple notes that Color
Classic users can move the contrast slider bar in the Screen
Control Panel all the way to the left, making the screen go pitch
black. It would seem that users in that situation are stuck, since
they can't see the slider bar any more, but pushing the screen
contrast button on the Color Classic's front bezel will bring the
screen back up.
Waiting for Newton
------------------
by Mark H. Anbinder, News Editor -- mha@tidbits.com
Apple's most actively publicized secret at the moment is Newton,
the code name for the company's upcoming handheld personal
organizer, and for the collection of new and adapted technologies
making up this project. Despite Apple's usual policy of keeping
unannounced products secret, Newton has been all the rage in the
trade journals, among industry watchers, and even in Apple's
publications and satellite television shows.
Newton will undoubtedly be a remarkable achievement when Apple
releases it later this year (the time until the first Newton-
related product introduction is now measured in weeks), combining
handwriting recognition, "intelligent" guesses about what our
scribblings and scrawlings might mean, and a completely new way of
storing data. However, one effect of all this publicity has been
to push the development of competing products.
One such product is the newly-released 2.2-pound EO, developed by
a consortium of companies including GO Technologies (who created
the unit's PenPoint user interface), manufacturing giant
Matsushita, and AT&T. EO even looks like one of the prototype
Newtons we've seen pictures of - a pad with a screen in the middle
and "ears" protruding from each side. The ears, shaped like a
Duo's floppy adapter, serve the similar function of providing
ports and connectors.
EO includes many of Newton's promised features. It has an icon-
driven interface and handwriting recognition to turn written block
letters into "normal" computer text (a cursive recognition module
is anticipated in a matter of weeks), and while it doesn't yet
know how to turn a rough sketch into an even square or circle, EO
can guess when you write "lunch with Bill Tuesday" that you
probably mean next Tuesday, you probably mean noon, and if you
don't mean Bill Gates, it presents a list of the other people
named Bill listed in your contacts database.
EO's $799 cellular phone option provides not only a handheld Oki
telephone that you use just like any other cellular phone, but
also a level of integration that lets EO dial Bill's number for
you and provides the capability to send or receive faxes just
about anywhere. The unit's 8 MB of ROM contains its operating
system and nine bundled applications. The RAM (4 MB expandable to
12 MB in the basic model) is therefore free to manipulate data,
and free for other PenPoint applications that you might choose to
add to the internal hard drive. Software can be added via EO's
PCMCIA type II slot or its optional external floppy drive, which
attaches via a port on one of the ears that doubles as a parallel
printer port.
Rumor has it that Apple, even fairly recently, had not yet decided
which of several Newton units to release first: the handheld unit
with a flip-up cover that looks like Dr. McCoy's tricorder should
have looked but didn't, the letter-sized pad with large screen
area and ears, or some other variation. Another decision
reportedly up in the air centers around which of the new
technologies, some still under development, should be released in
the first round. It seems likely that the decisions have been made
by this late date, but I'm worried that some of the decisions
might have been based not on what's ready or what makes sense, but
on what's needed to go up against EO, Sharp's existing products,
and other competitors' electronic organizers. (Some of Sharp's
upcoming products are based on Newton technology.)
One advantage Newton will have from the start is that its
projected selling prices (in the $800 neighborhood for basic
versions) are far lower than EO's price tag (from $1,999 for the 4
MB model with no modem and no hard drive, to around $4,000,
depending on the model and options you choose). It remains to be
seen whether Newton's features will be comparable, and whether the
look-and-feel of the package as a whole will prove worthwhile. For
those who hate waiting, though, and don't mind that the ultimate
evolution of the Rolodex, DayTimer, and Filofax lives in a product
that costs dozens of times as much, EO is available today.
EO -- 800/458-0880
Rebate Sparks Controversy
-------------------------
by Mark H. Anbinder, News Editor -- mha@tidbits.com
Apple USA today announced a new "On the Spot" rebate program that
promises hundreds of dollars in instant point-of-purchase rebates
to customers buying certain Macintosh models and peripherals in
the United States, but appears to have put itself, and many
dealers, "on the spot" in the process.
At first glance, this rebate offer isn't all that different from
previous offers. Essentially, Apple is providing an incentive for
people to come into the store, as well as a way of boosting sales
of some models that aren't selling too well or whose prices might
be dropping in the future. (Typically, such price drops don't
outshine the rebates that proceed them, so there's no need to
wait.) However, unlike with previous rebate programs, in this
case, Apple is asking some of its dealers to lay out the money
that's being handed to the customers.
Difficult logistics apparently prompted Apple to leave one segment
of its dealership population in this position, while other dealers
are receiving the rebate funds "in advance," in a sense, through
discounts on the related purchases from Apple. Unfortunately, the
details reached dealers so shortly before the beginning of the
program that there was little anyone could do but express
astonishment.
The good news for Macintosh users and prospective buyers is that,
while some dealers may elect not to participate because of Apple's
approach, most will, and the rebates are quite attractive.
Affected computers include the Centris 610 and Macintosh IIvx, and
rebates range from $125 to $300 depending on the specific computer
and configuration you choose. The IIvx, an unimpressive but solid,
respectable computer, has already been reduced in price
dramatically, and the rebate should make the price positively
sensational. (It should also make the IIvx good competition for
the hard-to-find LC III.)
There are also rebates on a variety of popular peripherals, to
further sweeten the deal. The rebate is simple; the amount is
simply subtracted from your purchase price (after taxes, sorry!)
before you sign the check. It could just make the difference
between affording an almost-as-good system, or the one you really
wanted.
Information from:
Apple propaganda
Pythaeus
Inspiration 4.0: Outliners and Me
---------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg -- clas005@csc.canterbury.ac.nz
Being obsessed with the flexible storage and retrieval of
information, I use an outliner all the time - Symmetry Software's
Acta. Being an academic, I use Acta mostly to hold my notes on
books that I read, and to prepare and update notes for lectures I
intend to give.
You know what an outliner is: it holds text in a form that looks
like - well, an outline. Let a piece of text be called (for
historical reasons) a topic; conceptually, it sits at some
hierarchical level, indicated by how much its left margin is
indented on the page. If we create another topic to follow the
first, it might be at the same hierarchical level, in which case
it is shown on the page below the first, and with the same
indentation. Or, we may make a new topic subordinate to the first:
it will then sit immediately below the first and with greater
indentation. If topics A and B are at the same level, and topic A
has subtopics, then topic A's subtopics will follow A (be just
below it) on the page, before B, thus showing that they belong to
A.
I am not addicted to outlining because all thought can be usefully
arranged into outline format. On the contrary, an outline's
combination of linearity (the topics run sequentially down the
page) with hierarchy (some topics are subordinate to other topics)
can render such arrangement quite artificial. A simple example is
a proof: from a hierarchical point of view, what is proven
"governs" the steps that support it, so the demonstrandum should
be the topic and the premises its subtopics; but from a sequential
point of view this looks backwards.
Rather, I use outliners because of the way they allow you, within
a traditional page-like medium, to view, navigate, and rearrange
material.
First, you can "close" a topic, so that its subtopics are hidden.
Suppose I have four topics at the top level of my outline: I can
start with all their subtopics (and therefore the subtopics of
those subtopics, etc.) hidden, so all I see is those four topics,
one right below the other. I go to the one I want and "open" it,
revealing its subtopics at the next level down. I go to the one of
these that I want and "open" it, and so on. If my topics are well
named, I can thus quickly find my way into my document and get
right to the piece of information or subject area that I want to
read or modify or whatever.
Second, a topic "owns" its subtopics. If I decide I don't like the
way I have classified a topic, I can move it to another place in
the outline, and all its subtopics (whether visible or not) will
travel with it. If my hierarchy is logically contrived, this makes
rearranging a lecture, say, much easier than trying to figure out
in a word processor how many paragraphs need to move in order for
the text to keep making sense.
Compare and Contrast
Inspiration Software (formerly Ceres Software) has come out with
version 4.0 of Inspiration, inspiring me to compare it with Acta.
You may recall that Adam reviewed the previous version of
Inspiration (3.0) in these electronic pages not long ago; I
wondered whether the new version deserved to be considered as my
own new outliner of choice.
As an afterthought, I also glanced at Symantec's More, which is
Inspiration's chief competition as a "high-end" outliner. The only
copy I could wangle for this review is outdated (version 2.01);
but that's okay, since the purpose of introducing More into the
picture was not to compare Inspiration with it, but just to help
put Inspiration's capabilities into perspective.
Be warned: I ignore here the graphic diagramming facilities that
characterize More and Inspiration. From one point of view this
seems unfair. The Inspiration folks see the program as "centered
on visual planning, brainstorming and idea development, not
outlining." I'm not trying, though, to misrepresent Inspiration:
it does have outlining capabilities, and I was genuinely curious
as to whether I could use them to move up from Acta.
Nitty Gritty
All three outliners share basic abilities to implement the
concepts of viewing and arrangement described above. They
distinguish a topic itself from the text of the topic in an
intuitive way. They let you simply hide a topic's subtopics (so
that when you "open" the topic again the visible structure below
it is as before) or fully collapse those subtopics (so that when
you "open" again you see only the topic's immediate subtopics). If
a topic has features that are not currently visible (say it has
hidden subtopics) they provide some visual indication of this.
They let you move a topic (with its subtopics) to a new position
by dragging. I could compare the implementation details of all
these facilities, but one's preferences here, though strong, will
be personal, and all three programs are perfectly adequate in
these areas.
Text entry is a major shortcoming in both Acta and Inspiration.
Acta relies on TextEdit. Inspiration apparently does not, but its
text entry is not much more sophisticated. In some ways it is
quirky. If you double click in a word, then drag down a few lines
(to include more words), the word you double-clicked in is
sometimes (if you change directions while dragging) no longer
included in the selection. Shift-click extends a selection, and
Option-Right-arrow moves to the start of the next word, but Shift-
Option-Right-arrow selects JUST the next word (it does not extend
the present selection). In contrast, More provides extremely
powerful shortcuts for selecting and navigating text, similar to
those in Microsoft Word.
Acta beats Inspiration slightly in facilities for navigation
amongst topics via keystrokes. One glaring example: both programs
have a keystroke to let you move to the topic sequentially
preceding the current topic, but Acta also has a keystroke to let
you move the cursor to the topic hierarchically governing the
current one, wherever it may be; Inspiration does not, and it's a
serious shortcoming (see below). Neither program lets you merge a
topic into a topic just above it and at the same level (as More
does); instead, you have to copy the text of one topic, paste it
into the other topic, then go back to the first topic and delete
it manually.
On the other hand, Inspiration gives you some great tools for
rearranging your material quite unheard of in Acta. In
Inspiration, there is a Demote command, which grabs all topics
sequentially below the current topic but at the same level, and
makes them hierarchically subordinate to it; and there is a
Promote command, which does just the opposite, grabbing all topics
hierarchically just subordinate to the current topic and bringing
them up to the same level. (More also has these.) What's more, you
can select multiple topics (not necessarily contiguous), including
or not including each topic's subtopics, as you please; you can
then move them all en masse by dragging, or cut them (and paste
them), or cause all to be moved or copied into subordination under
the first one selected (called "collecting"; you can do this with
More as well. When this is done with topics from disparate
locations and at various levels, the results are implemented in an
extremely sensible way. Inspiration also lets you "focus in" on a
topic, bringing that topic to the upper left of the window and
showing only it and its sub-topics. (More has the same thing,
called "hoisting".)
Inspiration provides a fundamental device lacking from Acta:
within a topic, it distinguishes the topic itself from a "note"
attached to that topic (like "body text" in Microsoft Word). If
you are in a topic and you hit Return, text following the Return
will be a note; the note is part of the topic (it has no
independent existence), but it can be hidden, so that you can view
your document without any notes visible. I like Inspiration's
implementation of this; you can enter a mode in which all notes
are invisible unless you click within the text of a topic, when
that topic's note appears, only to vanish again as soon as you
leave that topic. More has notes too (oddly called "documents"),
but in some ways I actually like Inspiration's implementation
better. Unfortunately, though, Inspiration misses a chief point
(in my view) of having such a feature, which is, to be able to
export JUST THE NOTES; this would allow you to use topics as
signposts to plan and build a long continuous piece of normal text
and then leave yourself with just the text. (The copy of More I
looked at apparently couldn't do this either.) Both Inspiration
and More do, however, let you print just the notes, which is
something.
Inspiration gives you much better control over fonts and
formatting than Acta, which is relatively primitive in this
regard. In Inspiration you have flexible control over the
appearance of the outline qua outline (e.g., whether topics are to
be numbered, and if so, how) - although this applies only to the
outline as a whole, whereas More lets you apply different
numbering formats to different parts of the document. Also, in
Inspiration you can set the default font characteristics for notes
text, and for topics at each level, separately (up to level 8,
since 9 through 99 are clumped together). You are also permitted
right- and centered-justification. However, you do not get fully
justified text (whereas in More you do), and Inspiration does not
provide style-sheets (whereas More does).
Other than the omission of a "Notes Only" mode, Inspiration is
splendid at exporting. Not only can you, for example, export to
Microsoft Word format, but when you do, you get Word's outlining
styles: your top-level topic ends up in Word's "heading 1" style,
your next-level topics in "heading 2" style, and so forth, which
is tremendously convenient. Acta, on the other hand, can export to
RTF, but it just provides indentation without styles - everything
comes out as nested modifications of "normal". (More has strong
exporting facilities as well, but I was unable to test them with
my borrowed copy.)
The facility that most intrigued me in Inspiration is its capacity
to give a topic a "child." This is an outline in its own right,
which is attached to the topic but represented by a square in the
document margin; when you double-click on it, it opens as an
outline in a separate window. I was hoping that this would turn
out to be a hypertextual facility, but it isn't; you can't link
any topic to any child, but rather, a topic can have just one
child. Remarkably, though, a topic within a child can have a child
of its own; and you can open any child by name at any time. So
even though it isn't hypertext, it does make the outline, as it
were, hyper-dimensional: instead of a topic having only the
subtopics that appear below it in the main outline, running
linearly down the page, it also has the subtopics that live in its
child outline, running in some virtual direction (into the screen,
perhaps?) - and so on.
Alas, when you export, children are not exported (can you think of
a sensible way to do it?); you can, however, "disown" a child,
making it an independent Inspiration document - and, just the
other way, you can copy an Inspiration document into the present
document as a child of any topic that doesn't have one. But note
that this is still not hypertextual: you cannot link a topic to a
different document, such that clicking on its child icon causes an
independent document to open from the disk.
Inspiration is System 7-savvy, and you can use System 7 to publish
a topic or topics. What is publishable, though, is not an outline
or even a piece of an outline; because Inspiration is a graphic
tool, it's a graphic representation of the topic title (published
from the graphic view of the document), in which notes and
subtopics are not available. From an outlining point of view, it
would be neat if the text were publishable as well.
One aesthetic gripe about Inspiration: it messes up my screen's
appearance, basically turning my 16 greys into simple black-and-
white. (Being a ResEdit nut, I tried to fix this by altering the
program's PLTE resource - it worked for Word 5.1! - but failed.)
This really gets my goat, and seems to me to be a sign of bad
programming (though, to be fair, I am well aware that handling
colors in a Mac application is tremendously difficult). I find
this behaviour so upsetting that it almost sets me against
Inspiration despite all its other good points. Almost, but not
quite...!
Conclusions
My imaginary ideal outliner derives from my experiences with
ThinkTank in its old Apple ][ incarnation. This program showed me
what an outliner can be, and in some basic ways neither Acta nor
Inspiration quite measures up. ThinkTank had wonderful navigation
facilities for swift and convenient interface with your document.
An example: it distinguished between "navigate up" (move the
cursor up into the topic just above the current one, regardless of
its depth in the nesting) and "navigate up at the same level"
(move the cursor up into the topic above the current one at the
same depth), with a single keystroke for either. Both Acta and
Inspiration can do the former; neither can do the latter.
This is not a minor point. Imagine a large and complex outline
with many of its topics at many levels expanded. You know (because
it's your document) that you have a topic "Greek Goddesses," and
two of its subtopics at the same level are "Artemis" and
"Demeter." Suppose "Artemis" is higher up sequentially, and you
happen to be working in a subtopic of "Demeter" when you realize
you want to say or consult something about Artemis. But "Artemis"
may be way off above the screen somewhere. In ThinkTank, you could
navigate quickly. A keystroke meant, "go to the topic to which
this one is subordinate," so you clicked that a couple of times
until you had moved up the hierarchy and the current topic was
"Demeter". Then a keystroke meant, "go to the topic above and at
the same level as this one," so you clicked that, and it took you
instantly to another goddess; if this is Artemis, you're done, and
if not, click a couple times more. Now you're at "Artemis," and
you can work your way into the subtopics to find what you wanted.
In Acta, you can't do this, but the workaround is acceptable. The
first keystroke does exist, so you click it until you are at
"Demeter," and then once more, so that you are at "Greek
Goddesses." Now, if you don't see "Artemis" in the tangle of
subtopics, collapse "Greek Goddesses" so that none of its
subtopics show at all, then open it so just its immediate
subtopics show - and there are your goddesses, sitting in a nice
column. Now you can go right to "Artemis." It's true that you had
to go way back out, and close a lot of stuff you might have wished
you could leave open, but at least you can get where you want to
go.
In Inspiration, you can forget it. Neither keystroke exists. You
probably will end up scrolling painfully through your document,
searching by eye, just as if you weren't in an outliner at all.
Since ThinkTank was brought over to Macintosh and evolved into
(guess what?) More, it is not surprising that More turns out to
have this and other abilities that ThinkTank had and that Acta and
Inspiration lack. Although I find Inspiration's many special
features intriguing, such as multiple selection and children, its
poor performance at the most basic level, such as navigation and
text entry, makes Acta a better choice for me, despite its
simplicity in other respects. I'm much attracted by Inspiration's
notes facility, but since it doesn't export just the notes, if I
want to extract them I have to export to RTF, import into Nisus,
and massage with a macro, and at that point I'm not doing anything
I couldn't do with Acta in the first place, especially since Acta,
though it doesn't have notes per se, does have the ability to hide
all but the first line of a topic.
On the other hand, preparing this review has had the accidental
side-effect of making me want to investigate More, which even in
the earlier incarnation I looked at did nearly everything
Inspiration did, only better. (The comparison is fair, since More
lays tremendous emphasis on its graphic capabilities, as does
Inspiration.)
Presently, if I decide I want more than just Acta's basic vanilla
outlining features, I won't spring for Inspiration when More
provides the power of style sheets, excellent text entry, and
superb basic navigation. Price plays a role here, though. In
street-price terms, More weighs in around $265, Inspiration goes
for around $160, and Acta comes a bit lower. The only price I can
find for Acta is a list price of $145, and the street price should
be even less. That $100 difference between More and Inspiration
may matter to some people. Also, More's future is uncertain - I
have heard rumors about Symantec ceasing development on new
versions (when we asked Symantec this, we were told that Symantec
has neither announced plans for a version 4.0 nor said that
version 3.0 will be the last version). If Inspiration decides to
develop its basic outlining features more strongly, it could stand
poised to take over More's sector of the market, while also
beating Acta at its own game. Might the next version of
Inspiration be the answer to my outlining prayers?
Inspiration -- 503/245-9011 -- 503/246-4292 (fax)
inspiration@applelink.apple.com
Symantec -- 800/441-7234 -- 408/253-9600
70414.1331@compuserve.com
Symmetry -- 800/624-2485 -- 602/998-9106 -- 602/890-2541 (fax)
Reviews/14-Jun-93
-----------------
* MacWEEK -- 07-Jun-93, Vol. 7, #23
RasterOps Editing Ace Suite -- pg. 47
Datebook Pro 2.0 -- pg. 47
Touchbase Pro 3.0 -- pg. 51
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