<p>Count the threads! [Under the "Thr" column]. I don't know what the
second thread is doing, from the lack of responsiveness, the answer must be
"not a lot". I suspect it is the thread that runs from the stuff AmiPro
puts in the startup folder to try to make launching AmiPro a bit quicker by
preloading some DLLs.
<p>Finally, I had to give up on the undo feature. It hasn't quite got to the stage where
I disable the viewing of graphics, but it is getting close.
<p>I've installed a couple of patches I've found on the net, but not noticed any gain
in stability.
<p>A couple of things likely to crash AmiPro are: <em>any</em> use of the SEQ power
field, use of the SET power field if you are not careful with the variables it uses.
If you have footnotes as endnotes, and select over the end of the last page of the document
proper (so that the selection should extend to the endnotes) it crashes. I've used
the Windows version of AmiPro, and apart from being a lot faster and including the
mini-draw package, neither of these two bugs seem to show their ugly heads.
<p>Here are some of my experiences with AmiPro. I have no record of all the crashes
I received under revision 30.945. This is a log of the crashes I had with 30.947
(the log says 30.946, but the about box of AmiPro said 30.947).
<pre>
*** Release 30.946.0 ***
EBP = 2bc338
ESP = 2bc338
EIP = 15bfe
[0] = 230a9b
[1] = 63dfd
[2] = 62b24
[3] = 624e7
[4] = 81262
[5] = 12d8f
[6] = 11efa
[7] = 10f76
[8] = 20cf2
[9] = 1d3e6
[10] = 1d351
[11] = 280e1
[12] = 28017
[13] = 28db0
[14] = 26799
[15] = 56015
[16] = 55f1c
[17] = 1a23031c
[18] = 54c1d0df
[19] = ce39c760
</pre>
<p>The file goes on like that for another 35 crashes.
<p>I have since "progressed" to revision 30.948. I hear there is a 30.949, but
have not seen it released as an update.
<p>Lotus should include some sort of attrib -r tool, cos when AmiPro
crashes, it leaves all open documents marked as read only, and if you
restart AmiPro and load up the documents again, you are told the document
is read only and cannot be saved.
<h3>Log of crashes.</h3>
<p> Well, I'm going to keep a log of crashes (and data losses) for the world to see.
<p>14/5/95
<br>Started AmiPro, opened a document, used goto to go to roughly where I
wanted to do some editing, scrolled a bit to get to the exact spot, pressed
the enter key and AmiPro crashed.
<p>15/5/95
<br>A Windos program I was running crashed and died horribly. since I was
overcommitted, I thought I'd shut down AmiPro. However, AP seemed to take
sympathy with the Windos app (well, after all, it is only a Windos app
pretending to be an OS/2 app), and it sort of went into a vegetative state
(locking me out of the input queue, of course!). 10 minutes later, it died,
and I was able to proceed.
<p>25/5/95
<br>Opened Chapter 1, did File->Document Info... -> Update. AmiPro crashed.
<p>15/6/95
<br>Long time, no crashes (also, much slacking)
<br>Went to have a chat with my supervisor. When I got back, AmiPro had crashed.
<p>20/6/95
<br>This morning, a CD with the UK version on it arrived. Oh joy, £ signs instead of $, British grammar, A4 by default instead of letter. I also hoped it would be the long awaited 30.949 revision. I should have saved my optimism. It is 30.947, older than the update I had already.
<br>One crash on starting up AmiPro. 4 equations vanished from a document, which, with minor changes, shot from 5Mbytes to 20Mbytes, due to one of the many bugs in the software.
<p>12/7/95
<br>In the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that the toolbar keeps vanishing every time I minimize and restore. Also, the equation editor bar would not become visible earlier. One crash today, scrolling along and I was hit
by a sys3171. Thankfully I had just done a save. Chapter 7 has now bloated to a shade under 30 million bytes.
<p>13/7/95
<br>Two pieces of good news, but balanced by two pieces of bad. I received the French dictionary for AmiPro 3, but it has a Windos installer that made life very difficult. I managed to get it installed by fooling it with a <code>lotus.ini</code> file in the \winos2 directory that someone was kind enough to send me. It works perfectly, despite the shaky start. AmiPro crashed three times today (sys3175). The second piece of good nes is that I discovered that the "save for speed" vs "save for conserve disk space" is actually much much faster if you select conserve disk space, for large documents.
<p>14/7/95
<br>Three AmiPro crashes so far today. One involved losing baout 20 minutes work. Thankfully, it was only moving sections around within a chapter, no actual writing was lost. Irritating nvertheless.
<p>16/7/95
<br>One crash today.
<br>I've finally worked out how to stop AmiPro from updating dates in stylesheet generated letters.
<ol>
<li>Make a new letter with the letter style you want. By default
this will have a date in it that you *cannot* stop being updated in
the future
<li>Delete the date power field and insert a new one.
<li>When you select "Now" from the Insert Power Field dialog box, it
will incorrectly put "Now %Da" in the entry field. Correct this to be "Now()"
and the format you desire.
<li>It would be nice if Step 4 were simply "check the 'lock'
checkbox, then click on OK. But the "lock" check box is disabled,
so you have to click on OK.
<li>Go back into the Edit Power Fields Insert... Dialog box. This time
the "Lock" checkbox should be enabled. Check that. Then the OK button
is disabled, confusingly, you have to click on Cancel to accept the
"Lock" option.
</ol>
<p>19/7/95
<br>Majorly bad day today. At about 20h30, just before I was due to go home, I was cursoring around a
table (on about page 8 of a 68 page document). Suddenly the insertion point jumped to the very last page
(no, I didn't press ctrl-Page Down). Then I noticed that Figure 107 was missing. And 106. And 105. And ... and ... and ...
and all the way back to about figure 15. Nightmare. Around 85 figures, vanished. My 68 page chapter was reduced to 29 pages. Of course, I had been saving my work
intermittently throughout the day (because AmiPro crashes so often, but the autosave is numbingly slow and becomes intensely annoying), and I had saved this garbage, trashed and corruptd version. I have backups, but
it's probably just as quick to reinsert the figures manually. So at a swoop, AmiPro destroyed a good days work.
And they call it a productivity app. Another few days at that rate, and it will have completely destroyed my thesis!
I'd also comment that this happened with the user setting "save to conserve disk space". I think it is going
a bit far to conserve disk space by deleting the user's work.
<p>22/7/95
<br>One crash today. sys3175. Lost some work.
<p>Holiday. No crashes for 15 days.
<p>10/8/95
<br>Ran Grammar checker, and found that all of the grammar styles (Business Writing, Academic Writing, Technical Report and so forth) were corrupted. Reinstalled AmiPro from scratch to get them back. Reinstallation is a hairy process, involving manually deleting icons, templates and rather a lot of os2.ini entries.
<p>15/8/95
<br>One crash. sys3175. I had just saved, and was about to close AmiPro. I suppose sometimes I'm lucky.
<p>17/8/95
<br>One crash. sys3175 didn't lose any work
<p>18/8/95
<br>One crash. Had just started editing a file, paged down to the page, scrolled to the line I wanted, pressed Home to get to the start of the line, and AmiPro crashed. sys3175
<p>22/8/95
<br>One crash. Loaded my thesis master document, and printed it. It printed as far as chapter 5, then crashed. sys3175. Also on this day I bough PC Magazine (UK) which has a CD containing WordPro beta (Windose 3.1 version most likely) and a 45 day demo version of Windozz SmartSuite. I might try using that in order to get my thesis finished.
<br>Also, it would <b>NOT</b> print page numbers in chapter 2, even though I expressly selected that. Twice.
<p>24/8/95
<br>Some kind soul (who shall be anonymous, just in case) sent me release 30.949 US amipro.exe and amipro3.dll (the components in all previous AmiPro patches to date). Unfortunately they did not fix the SEQuence power field bug.
<p>25/8/95
<br>After weeks of unremitting bad news, today I tried installing a new LaserJet driver. It was utter rubbish. I also tried a new S3 driver. Lo and behold, the bug with lines in the document margins was fixed. Still, the drivers are only usable at the lowest refresh rate due to chronic horizontal streaking during every screen update at higher refresh rates.
<p>29/8/95
<br>After a peaceful weekend, it has been a black day indeed for AmiPro. I have simply lost count of the number of times it crashed today. I can only guess at twelve, though it could well be more, Well, gentle reader, the problem was that I used the Power Fields. The problem with Power Fields in AmiPro is they are completely screwed. FUBAR. I'll add another bug I was reminded of today. If you use the Bookmark Power Field (which is supposed to copy the text that you added a bookmark for at the insertion point of the Power Field), you get the Power Field dialog box. When you select Bookmark from the list of available power fields, you also get, in another MLE, a list of the bookmarks available in the current document, and the first of these is highlighted and copied to the entry field for the Power Field. So Far so good. If you then decide to select a different Bookmark, instead of the name replacing the one that was originally selected, it is added at the end of the entry field. This is
illegal syntax, so you have to go and manually edit the entry field. A pain.
<br>By the end of the day, I think it had crashed 19 times, but that is only approximate.
<p>30/8/95
<br>I 'phoned Lotus customer support (aka the Peter Gabriel album music line) in the morning and was told to send a disk with an example document. AmiPro crashed 7 times at work. Then I wrote a cover letter to Lotus, and in the middle of that, AmiPro crashed. No, no power fields, nothing special, just typing away and it crashed. I was intensely annoyed, so I re-wrote the letter with EPM (which, though only prerelease, has never crashed on me). I posted a copy of the letter to comp.os.os2.apps.
<p>31/8/95
<br>After two days of nothing but AmiPro crashing, "attrib - r chap1.sam" and "attrib -r bibliography.sam" I was too depressed to contemplate using AmiPro. So no crashes today.
<p>1/9/95
<br>Pressed the cursor down key after adding 1 paragraph and 1 andnote, and AmiPro crashed.
<p>5/9/95
<br>5 crashes in the morning. 4 trying to run regenerate master doc. 1 while running startup.
<p>10/9/95
<br>Just the one crash today. I was cursoring around a large equation, and it just crashed. Also, it seems as though AmiPro is rather limited to the number of nested brackets and divisors it can handle.
<p>21/9/95
<br>Well, a week or so of drawing graphs and a bit of programming, so no crashes. Yesterday, I received a letter from Lotus support. The bugs I reported were either reproducible, and they had no answers, or not reproducible and they suggested I try booting with plain VGA and no non-essential drivers. I tried that. It made no difference whatsoever.
I also discovered that the dreaded SEQ bug could be circumvented if I refresh the power fields before saving. So for each chapter I created a little macro that would update all power fields then save it. Emboldened by this progress, I proceeded to see if I could put bookmarks on the SEQ fields and reproduce them elsewhere or in separate documents. It seemed to work, but whenever
I tried to save the document with bookmark-on-SEQ, the bookmark would be lost, so when it was reloaded, I would get "bookmark not found". Amazing eh? One step forwards, one step backwards. In the process of this testing,
AmiPro crashed 9 times. It also corrupted one of my chapters so that it would crash instantly on loading it. <a href="crash.sam">Here</a> is the file if anyone wants to try to load it.
<p>23/9/95
<br>One crash today. Was searching for a string, and using the repeat search feature. Somewhere towards the end of the file, I repeated the search and AmiPro crashed.
<p>25/9/95
<br>Maybe it is a good thing I did not write about the two crashes I had at the time they happened, otherwise I would be forced to include some deeply profane comments. First crash, I was cutting some text out of a document and pasting it into another (just in case I decide to put it back). Unfortunately, the cut text included some of the dreaded broken SEQ power fields, and I tried to save the new file. AmiPro prompty hung tight. Ctrl-Esc eventually brought up the "AmiPro: this application is not responding" message box. I selected enter to kill it, and it started to close, but failed to close fully, leaving part of itself drawn on the screen and the PM queue still hung.
Great. Lotus can't even write an application that crashes gracefully. So I telnetted in to my PC from a unix system (thankfully that worked) and killed amipro.exe. Of course, all the changes I had made to the document and the new document I was pasting to were all lost. The second crash occurred 5 minutes before home
time. Again, I was cutting and pasting some text from a main document to a backup document. This time the cut was right at the end of the document, and in my hurry, I accidentally selected a bit too far, and the selection tried to cross the main document boundary to the endsnotes as footnotes. This instantly crashed AmiPro, another 20 minutes work lost. Another thing I noticed during the day was that the document I was working on suddenly became filled with
@body@ symbols after each equation (which is supposed to be an invisible indication of the paragraph style). Also, where I had inserted SEQ power fields, it was as though viewing the power fields had overwritten the text following the power fields, rather than simply expanding and shifting the text across. Whether this was as a result of one of the crashes or due to saving the file with view-show power fields on, I am not sure.
<br>Later same day... 2 crashes, both times opened Chapter 7, used File->Doc Info->Update, and it crashed SYS3175. Third time, loaded the document, ran Edit->Power Fields->Update all, turned off the run frame macros checkbox in the Doc Info dialogue box, and it seemed to be happy again.
<p>26/9/95
<br>One time PM locked up whilst AmiPro was printing (generating a multimegabyte postscript spool file cos AmiPro doesn't coexist with the PCL5 drivers). Another time AmiPro crashed when I clicked the down arrow on the right slider to scroll down. I tried to print the end 22 pages of a 70 page document. Three times it failed to print. I set the printer onject to not print during spooling, and eventually it worked. I tried to print a full 45 page document, and the first time, AmiPro only printed the first 5 pages.
<p>27/9/95
<br>Spent [wasted] some time resoring text <i>eaten</i> by the goddamn SEQ power fields. One crash. Opened a document, pressed ctrl-g, 36, enter to go to page 36, pressed page down a couple of times to get to page 37, then pressed ctrl-end to go to the end of the document and AmiPro crashed. Second crash, I had just typed in about a page of text from some written notes, into a 70 page document, and AmiPro crashed. Nothing special, just typing text. It makes me wonder if there is anything whatsoever that AmiPro for OS/2 is capable of doing that <b>doesn't</b> make it crash.
<br>I just did a before and after test to show the text eating bug in the SEQ power fields.
<br>
<IMG alt="Document before saving" SRC=before.gif>
<br>
<b>This is what I entered...</b>
<p>
<IMG alt="Document after SEQ had had its way" SRC=after.gif>
<br>
<b>...and this is what was left after the text eating SEQ bug had had a go</b>
<br>Of course, this bug with SEQ is not the same as the one that does not let me put a bookmark on a SEQ power field, and of course, that is not the same as the bug whereby AmiPro/2 locks up if I save a file containing SEQ power fields that are not up to date.
<p>30/9/95
<br>Well, I spent a while trying to work out why "1" charactersFootnote" instead of "Table Text". So I changed it back. Then I moved on through the document (this was on page one). And to my horror I saw that all of the title and subtitle styles
had magically turned into "Body" style, and all FORTY-SIX figures in the chapter had vanished. And the SEQ bug (one of) was eating text at the end of the chapter. A fine days performance from AmiPro. Another week at this rate and it will have deleted my entire thesis!
<br>Well, what does it show? Firstly, spot the pictures. Well, they've all gone, lost by AmiPro. Secondly, look at the corruption in the figure captions. Curious. @Body@ should be an invisible tag for the Body style, what on earth is it doing in the figure captions, which should be @Fig@ ??? Well, at least the SEQ power field hasn't actually eaten any of these captions, as it had done in about 40 other captions.
<p>7/10/95
<br>One crash today. Less crashes recently now I've deleted the power fields. This one happend when I went into outline view, selected the top 4 headings, AmiPro thrashed the disk a bit, and I changed focus to another app. AmiPro continued to thrash, then crashed.
<hr>
<p> I hear that Lotus is beta testing their upgrade from AmiPro, Word Pro, on
Winblows 95 and also perhaps the OS/2 version as well. (I have read their WWW
pages, but the mail address for information about Word Pro that they provide
is uneachable).
<p>Personally, I think they should fix their current software before
releasing the next lot.
<p>Maybe I'm cynical, but I have little faith in Lotus' ability to release
a timely and high quality product. I'm looking for something to replace
AmiPro, and DeScribe, Clearlook and StarWriter all seem to be possible
candidates.
<p>If I haven't entirely put you off them, this is the <a
href="http://www.lotus.com/">Lotus</a> homepage.
<p>Read some <a href="AmiProReview.html">comments from other AmiPro for OS/2 users</a> from usenet.
