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- From: kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth)
- Subject: Re: Notebook
- Message-ID: <1993Jan6.170752.6055@tc.fluke.COM>
- Reply-To: kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth)
- Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
- References: <1993Jan5.173711.6582@nynexst.com>
- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 17:07:52 GMT
- Lines: 48
-
- clare@nynexst.com (Clare Chu) writes:
- >
- >Anyone heard of a program called Notebook and/or have anything
- >to say about it? It's a utility where you can record notes,
- >and organize them. I think it's by Black Belt. My husband
- >is looking for a birthday present for me. I know... Too
- >close to Christmas, and he hasn't even paid the Mastercard
- >yet! :-)
-
- I have black belt's Notebook. It is a program that is almost sooooo cool...
-
- The idea of Notebook is a little tool to replace an engineer's notebook or
- some such thing. You can type text into it, and draw pictures. You can
- make bookmarks and go rapidly to the bookmark, like a section in the book.
- And it's all got a cool wysiwyg interface.
-
- Well, it has some problems. First, black belt went way too far with the
- notebook metaphor. They have ruled lines and a left margin line onto the
- pages. This isn't too bad because you can make them go away, but the text
- editor gets confused when you delete characters and so it sometimes draws to
- the left of the vertical rule, and sometimes doesn't. And I could never get
- the hang of when it did what.
-
- Because of the left margin, you waste some space on the screen. And it
- creates its own whole screen, which is another minor annoyance. Then
- there's a tool pad placed vertically on the right edge so you waste some
- more screen. To compensate they use a very small, somewhat difficult-to-read
- font, but it still doesn't amount to more than about 55-60 columns if you
- convert it to ASCII and show it with type or more. So you don't get too
- much info on a screen.
-
- It prints the page as a bit image. I guess this is because of the graphics,
- but it still really irritated me. It's slow and looks ugly. I don't know
- what I expected they'd do, but I was dissappointed.
-
- The picture drawing tools are really nice. You can draw lines, boxes,
- circles, and some other stuff, and then reshape them. In other words, it is
- a drawing program, not a paint program. You can move or delete a specific
- object in a drawing. It was so nice that it made the other problems seem
- even worse because I wanted to work with it so badly. I wish the lines had
- an option to have arrows automatically drawn on one or both ends, and I wish
- there was a way to enclose text in a rectangle and have the thing move as a
- unit. Still, I really liked the graphics.
-
- I stopped using Notebook after a week and never picked it back up. I really
- wanted to work with this tool, but it was just too hard. Now I'll have to
- build the same tool over again and try to overcome its weaknesses. What a
- hassle.
-