Re: Seven Hills softwares

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998 18:26:00 GMT, brian.hammack@rook.wa.com (Brian
Hammack) wrote:

>From the catalog we see:
>
> T<N| EXPRESS
>    | Express provides "background printing" so you can use your
>    | computer while your printer is working!  The longer or more
>    | complex the document, or the more documents being spooled, the
>    | more time you save!
>
>What version?

I have v1.1.

>There's a tradeoff here:  Yes, with this spooler you can send docs off
>to the printer and get on with life, but expect momentary pauses in
>those other things you're doing every few seconds, and if you are in
>some other program expect a line to be printed on your printer every
>few seconds instead of continually.  And if the other things you are
>going onto are 8-bit apps (ProTerm for one), it doesn't print at all.
>So "the more time you save" is a misnomer; the only time you're saving
>on an unaccellerated machine is what would be spent staring at the
>print window before you could do something else -- which is made up for
>in spades waiting for the docs to GET printed.  Still, it's a nice CDev
>to have for some purposes and quite flexible in function.

I used to use it to print the issues of GEnieLamp (yes that is a
captial E, tells you how long ago it was :-) to take to work with me
when I was working as a security guard but it took so long I'd have to
go do something else while it printed.  Once I installed Express, I
could tell it to print and then I could start up Shanghai and play it
until the printing was done.

Yes, printing took longer than it would doing it straight to the
printer but at least I got to amuse myself while it was printing.  :-)

There is a nice feature in the CDEV too.  If you decide you want to
print something as fast as possible and don't mind not being able to
use the computer while it prints, instead of inactivating the CDEV and
rebooting your IIgs, all you have to do is open the CDEV and click the
"Options" button you can check the "Express inactive" box to turn
Express off.  You can turn it back on again, just as easily.  No need
to reboot.

Another nice feature is the fact that you can tell Express not to
delete a spooled document after it has finished printing it.  This
means that you can spool a form of some kind to Express and any time
you need to print a copy of it, you can just tell Express to print it
again.  No need to load the program it was created in, load the
document and go through the rendering and spooling steps again.

> T<N| KANGAROO
>    | Kangaroo adds itself into any "Open" or "Save" dialog box so
>    | you can quickly hop from one folder to another.
>
>What version?

I have v1.3.

>And has someone done something with the Hierarchic CDev so that it
>obeys the "no boot icons" toggle of SetStart?  (This is my gripe about
>the program; screws up my BootPic-init startup screen.)

I'm not sure what you mean but there is a fix called KangyFixer or
something like that (I could find out exactly as I have it here
somewhere) that apparently stops (or possibly blows up) the kangaroo
that hops across the top of the Welcome to the IIgs window of the
startup screen.

> T<N| SPECTRUM
>    | This is an incredible a graphics-based telecommunications program
>    | written specifically for the Apple IIGS. It uses the standard
>
>This description doesn't contain "accellerator suggested", like every
>other mention of Spectrum does (and for a good reason, at speeds
>greater than 9600 characters get dropped in several emulations).  And
>there's no mention here of its use with Marinetti, and no mention of
>the Spectrum Internet Suite (is this a not-recent catalog?).

Actually, I've used it successfully at 19200 bps on my unaccelerated
machine for years.  I sometimes even got it to work have decently at
38400 bps but file transfers usually got some checksum errors at that
speed.

I'm looking forward to using Spectrum at 57600 bps when my accelerator
arrives sometime within the next week or so.  :-)

>What version?  I know a new one was shown off at KFest...  :)

The description would be for v2.1 as v2.2 has not been released yet.
I'm sure once it is released, they will update the description.

>    | The answer is: ProTERM is an excellent program, but
>    | Spectrum does more.
>
>Change that.  "Spectrum does _different_", not necessarily more.

Oh, I'd say it does more.  It has more scripting commands and
capabilities, has an editor that can deal with files much larger than
45k, might have more file transfer protocols, has support for drop in
XCMDs, can access MS-DOS, HFS, DOS 3.3 and Pascal disks with the
appropriate FST installed, can be multi-tasked with The Manager
(dubious honour, I know :-) and will soon have direct support for
TCP/IP so that it can be used as a telnet client and with scripts can
do much more like web browsing with SIS and I'm sure an FTP and even a
newsgroup reader could be written for it.

I'm also hoping to have a version of the Mailbox as a Spectrum script
just in case anyone prefers to run all their communications stuff from
one place.

But then, I've been using Spectrum for years so I might be a little
biased.  However, I do have ProTERM v3.0 here and am thinking of
upgrading it to v3.1 just so I can have the latest of both.  :-)

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    Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University on Delphi
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