Amiga MA Magazine 1998 #6/amigamamagazinepolishissue1998.iso/www/cucug/amiga/amiinfo/reviews/addressit.txt

Internet Message Format | 1997-11-07 | 13KB

Path: kernighan.cs.umass.edu!barrett
From: [e-mail] (Everett M. Greene)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Address-It! version 1.5
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 4 Jun 1996 03:51:53 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
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Message-ID: <4p0bsp$[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Everett M. Greene)
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Keywords: database, mailing list, address book, commercial
X-Review-Number: Volume 1996 Number 14
Originator: [e-mail]


PRODUCT NAME

    Address-It! version 1.5


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    Address-It! is an inexpensive commercial product that
provides for creating and maintaining mailing lists and address books.
It has the capability of printing selected entries from a list or book
in several forms including: mailing labels, envelope, rotary file
cards, address book, and phone book.


AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

    Name:        Legendary Design Technologies, Inc.
    Address:    515 Park Road North #9
            Brantford, Ontario N3R 7K8

    Telephone:    [phone]
    FAX:        [phone]

    E-mail:        [e-mail]
    World Wide Web:    http://www.io.org/~legend


LIST PRICE

    The price is about $25 (US).


DEMO VERSION

    None.


SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

    HARDWARE

        512 KB RAM required.  1 MB is recommended by Legendary.

    SOFTWARE

        AmigaDOS 1.3 and later is required.


COPY PROTECTION

    None.


MACHINES USED FOR TESTING

    Amiga 1000, 4 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 1.3

    Amiga 3000/25, 4 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 3.1


INSTALLATION

    The Address-It! package is delivered on one common AmigaDOS
floppy disk.  Installation to a hard drive consists of clicking on the
custom "install" icon and specifying where you wish to have the
program installed.  If you are using AmigaDOS 1.3, there is a box to
check to have a special library, req.library, installed as well.

    The installation process also "installs" some free programs
and a sample address book.  The free programs include: Screen_Jaeger,
a screen capture program; Dotz, a connect-the-dots game; Prism, a
low-budget, text- only animator; StripANSI, a program to remove ANSI
escape sequences from text files; and VS2PR, a program to convert
VideoScape 3D images to PageRender 3D images and vice versa.


REVIEW

    This review is based on a year or more's use of Address-It!
to maintain a personal address book, a membership list for a small
local organization, and a mailing list for another local organization.
The address book and membership list uses both have about 100 entries
in them.  The mailing list has over 900 entries.  The membership list
is used and maintained by the reviewer who has many year's experience
in computing while the mailing list is used and maintained by the
reviewer's wife who is a complete novice in computing.

    Getting started with Address-It! is quite simple in that you
can simply launch the program and start entering names and addresses.
Fields are provided for salutation, first name, last name, job title,
company, three address lines, city, state/province, mailing code (ZIP
or whatever), country, and four lines of comments.  There are also
fields for three telephone numbers, birthdate, and one user-defined.
There are also up to fifteen "tags" which can be applied to each
entry; these tags are also user-defined and can be anything which
would allow you to retrieve all the entries belonging to one of the
tag groups.

    Once entries have been made into an Address-It! "data base",
maintaining the entries is quite simple.  Editing of the entries
consists of simply typing in the changes when the appropriate entry is
on the screen.  A slider gadget along the bottom of the main window
allows you to move to the approximate place in the list after which
you can step to successive entries until the correct one is found.
After making any change, moving to another entry "saves" the changes.
Address-It! notes that changes have been made and will provide a
warning if you try to exit the program without saving the changes to a
file.

    There are gadgets in the main window for deleting and finding
entries in the list.  If you are working with an existing list, there
are also gadgets for creating a new entry and for adding a new entry
to the list.  The program is automatically in the "add" mode when
started by itself or "new" is selected from the "project" menu.

    Address-It! provides seven different formats in which the list
entries can be viewed as selected from the "format" menu.  The main
window is considered to be the "normal" format in addition to which
there is a "browse" format and the five printing formats (see "Brief
description", above).  The browse format shows the entries in a an
entry-per-line form; each entry can be selected or deselected by
clicking on the box next to the line or from the "tag" menu.  This
selection or "tagging" allows selective printing of entries.

    This covers the high points of Address-It! and its
capabilities. All the functions described work in the expected manner
and no serious errors have been encountered in their repeated use.

    There are, however, some warts on the frog.  First and
foremost, the program is not as bullet-proof as it could or should be
for the inexperienced user.  In many cases, the program displays the
equivalent of requesters, but, unlike true requesters, these
equivalents do not lock the underlying layers.  It is thus possible
for the inexperienced user to mistakenly click on something in an
underlying window and thereby cause problems for the program.  Some of
these problems are of the nature that you have to reboot your machine
to recover.

    A shortcoming for the inexperienced user is the need to click
on the "new" button before starting to make a new entry in an existing
list and then clicking on the "add" button when the new entry is
completed.  Failure to do either of these steps or failing to click
"add" after each successive new entry results in new entries not being
entered into the list.  It is also very easy to mistakenly click on
the "add" button more than once and have a null entry in the list.

    Another deficiency is the sorting of the entries.  All new
entries are always appended to the end of the list.  If you wish to
have them in some order (any one of eleven different sort orders), you
must manually initiate the sorting.  The entries will be sorted in
very quickly, but, the entries will not be saved in the sorted order.
Each time you start the program on an out-of-order list, you must
manually sort the list again.

    A subjective deficiency of the sorting process is that it's
case- sensitive.  This can be of no consequence unless you have people
or businesses with lower-case letters at the beginning of their names
and are sorting on those fields.  Then you will have Cecil B. deMille
located after Efram Zimbalist; you can spend quite some time trying to
find Mr. deMille who won't be among the rest of the "D"s where you
think he should be.  The reviewer got so disgusted with the
case-sensitivity and the failure to have the sorted list saved that he
produced his own program to sort and save the sorted list.

    An area where the program is difficult to use is the printing
process.  The printing preview features are not WYSIWYG, so you are
left with a fair amount of trial-and-error work to get things to print
the way you want them to appear in hardcopy.  This can be very trying
when you wish to print an address list which must be aligned to mail
labels.  The reviewer has found it to be easier to produce
special-purpose programs to read the data maintained by Address-It!
and produce mailing labels than it is to go through the process needed
to do the same thing directly from Address-It!

    One feature that didn't seem to work as it should is the modem
dialing.  Attempts to use this feature resulted in the correct number
being dialed, but being unable to get the modem off the line when the
called party answered.  No particular effort was made to resolve this
problem since it is of minor importance to the reviewer.  Recent
changes to the telephone system for calls within one's own area code
have further complicated matters.


DOCUMENTATION

    The Address-It! documentation consists of a 36-page, 8-1/2" X
5- 1/2", saddle-stitched booklet.  Additional information is provided
in a "readme" file on the floppy disk and a three-page supplement to
the user's guide for version 1.5.

    The documentation is reasonably good.  It addresses the use of
Address-It! from the standpoint of a novice.  Thus, early portions of
the guide involve explaining what a gadget is, how to click on them,
etc.  For the most part, the program's use is intuitive enough that
very little use is made of the guide except for finding details of
some more obscure features.


LIKES

    The product is inexpensive and performs its fundamental tasks
in the expected manner.


DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS

    Some aspects of the program's sorting of the entries leaves
much to be desired.  The need to sort the entries each time the
program is run after out-of-order additions have been made is a
definite shortcoming.  The case- sensitivity of the sorting can cause
problems if your entries include names starting with lower-case
letters ("de Geuss" will be found after "Zimblast", for instance).

    The program's use of non-requester "requesters" is a definite
shortcoming for those who are not familiar with Amiga GUI conventions.
It is quite easy to click on a gadget of other than the front
"requester" and cause the program to hang or require all sorts of
gyrations to recover.  The design is not as bullet-proof as it could
and should be for the inexperienced user.

    The method of making new entries could also stand to be made
more bullet-proof for the inexperienced user.  It is quite easy to
fail to save an entry and/or to make a null entry.  The null or
otherwise corrupted entry is in turn the suspected cause of the sort
hanging problem.

    It has been suggested to Legendary that alphabetic characters be
displayed above the slider gadget of the main window so as to be able
to more readily get close to a desired entry.  When and if this will
be added is unknown.


COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

    The only other mailing list/address book program I've tried
was a PD one which left me with undeletable files.  Anything is an
improvement compared to that one!


BUGS

    I have repeatedly encountered some unknown situation where the
sorting process will hang.  I suspect there is a problem with
"non-standard" entries such as mistakenly-entered blank names.
Legendary claims to be unable to reproduce the problem.


VENDOR SUPPORT

    I have reported the problems as they were found in the early
days of working with the program.  The original program I received,
1.1, was replaced very early with version 1.5 which had most of the
problems corrected.

    Suggestions made regarding improvements have received a
"noted" response, but with no promise of any action being taken.

    There have been reports of Legendary not responding to e-mail
or other communications in a timely manner.  My experience in recent
months has been similar.

    Legendary has been the distributor for my genealogy program
for the last year.  Most of the things noted about Address-It!
occurred prior to that agreement being in place.


WARRANTY

    None.


CONCLUSIONS

    I would rate the program as reasonably good.  If you want to
use only the most basic features of the program, then it is more than
adequate and the price is right.  If you want to run a commercial
mailing list business, then the program is probably too lightweight
for that.  Give it three stars out of five.


COPYRIGHT NOTICE

    None.


REVIEWER

    Everett M. Greene
    [e-mail]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Everett M. Greene   (The Mojave Greene, crotalus scutulatus scutulatus)
Ridgecrest, Ca. 93555           Path: [e-mail]

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