Balloon 2.0 - Slow!

[ug0a@rzstud1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Alexander Siegfried)]

Oops, seems this damn vi editor scrambled up my message.
Well, here is the complete text:

Diz writes:
>As others have noted, the main speed advantage of
>Balloon is that when you use it you don't have to
>quit your current application and run GS-ShrinkIt.
>But, beyond that, the main reason for the speed
>difference is that Ballon is an NDA and it has to
>live INSIDE an application.  So, it might not be able
>to grab all the memory needed to load a file
>completely into memory (like GS-ShrinkIt does), so,
>it plays it safe, which can sometimes mean playing it
>slow.

...and exactly this fact makes Balloon v2.0 in my opinion
completely worthless. With this speed problem the Balloon NDA
offers no advantage over Shrinkit GS 1.01 for the user. You
can switch to Shrink It! GS, decrunch files and return to the
(comm) application in nearly the same time it takes Balloon
v2.0 to decrunch the files.

Also, where are the real improvements over Shrink It GS v1.1?
Will there ever be support for more packing formats? Well,
Diz himself gave the answer when asked about support for .SDK
images. "The NDA would get too large", he said, and so the
answer was no... You see, being a NDA is actually not a
positive feature, it is a limitation.

The bottom line is that Balloon even lacks features Shrink It
GS v1.1 has, like .SDK support, which is absolutely essential
and the ability to create .SEA archives.

One advantage over Shrink It! would be that you can decrunch
files while you are online. But hey, you must be a real fool
to do so, because you would be wasting online time and money
since Balloon can not decrunch files in the background (which
would be impossible to do in Spectrum anyway because of the
interrupts).

So why pay $20 bucks for less features and less speed if you
can have more features and more speed for free?

Sorry to sound that negative on Balloon v2.0, but perhaps
some people agree with what I've written...


Christopher