Hey there, Amiga PageStream Users,

Here's a real endorsement, cross-posted from Team Amiga Mailing
List:

*** Forwarded message, originally written by Dave Haynie on 26-Oct-01 ***

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001 15:14:38 -0600, "Larry N. Bolch" <lnbolch@telusplanet.net> jammed all night, and by sunrise was heard saying:

> You have the ideal and you have reality. Ideally - without MP - everyone
> writes good code, follows the rules and life is tickety-poo. Nothing
> crashes, no work is lost and the planet keeps on turning.

Yes, that's the ideal.

> Reality is a different thing. I made my living doing DTP on the Amiga for
> half-a-dozen years. Every time I quit ProPage, I made sure I closed
> everything else, because 95% of the time the machine would guru.

Maybe that's about the time I switched to PageStream. Yeah, sure,
exiting is often an area of oversight. But how reliable was ProPage in
acutal use?

> Why should a user have to become habituated to a life of crash preparation?

10's of millions of Microsoft Office users are invariably asking
themselves the same thing, just not loudly enough to solve the problem.

> Adding an NT machine - now running W2k - was a revelation. Two red gurus in
> two years!

Actually, given that Win2K's gurus-of-death are blue, you have a pretty
high percentage of red ones there.

> Oh, and when I upgraded the OS, ProDraw
> would retain a shadow from the Open requester and developed a number of
> other quirks. It really did not like working in colour after that.

ProPage/ProDraw, and more than likely other GoldDisk tools, were not
exactly standards of good behavior. They did so much custom in gadgetry
and all, rather than using the higher-level OS functions, it's no wonder
they ran into problems.

With that said, I had my office A2000 (eventually with A2630 and a DKB
memory board) at Commodore up for months at a time, generally with both
ProPage (later PageStream) and ProDraw both up and running. The actual
crash-during-use happened, sure, but less often than any modern Web
browser I'm using these days, or any MS-Office tool I have used (ok,
sure, they were so insanely bad that I dropped them years back and have
not used them since).

> If a computer is only for hobby use, and you are not irritated as you watch
> the machine reboot, then a lack of MP is just fine. You realize that
> programs are hand made by humans, and have a tendency to be imperfect.

While that's true, if you followed the AmigaOS design guidelines,
including debugging carefully with MemMunge, Enforcer, etc. you got high
quality, if not perfect, applications code. And since, eventually, all
the magazines ran these same tools in their app reviews, the need for
this level of debugging became the standard in Amiga software. On
Windows, the buggy, crashy, 2,749-features, half of which work trend in
Microsoft-ware has influenced the industry in a similar-but-negative way.
Sure, there are exceptions, but you have to hunt for them. For example,
I tried three non-linear video editing systems before I found one stable
enough for actual use (Adobe Premiere was questionable, ULead Media
Studio Pro buggy to the point of useless, Sonic Foundry's Vegas very
solid).

> However, by
> the time I moved most of my client work to the NT box, almost every
> productivity application I depended upon had been orphaned.

That's what drove me, ultimately, to use non-Amiga software. I simply
couldn't commit, business-wise, to an application that was no longer
supported. Just too much risk.

Odd thing is, except for Scala, I actually could still use PageStream
for DTP today if I wanted to (and actually, if I had anything that
really moved beyond "Word Processor" to DTP, I might just do that),
because at Metabox and now at Merlancia, documents are standardized on
Adobe Acrobat format. So any WP/DTP can be used.

--
Dave Haynie d.haynie@merlancia.com http://www.merlancia.com
Chief Technology Officer, Merlancia Industries

*** End of forwarded message ***

Kind regards, all due respect, etc.,
--
DAVID L. STEVENS - dstevens@cityscape.net - Springfield, IL USA
TEAM AMIGA - Jay Miner Society - SPUG Computer Club A3000T/040
#http://users.motion.net/dstevens/#

***At bottom, it's always about money. Except when it's about sex.***