[duxuser] Re: DBT 10.5
- From: "George Bell" <george@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 17:19:13 +0100
Hi Kaye & Christie,
Sorry this reply has become longer than I'd intended, but I
wanted to try and get some perspective into things.
You won't get an argument from me regarding the integration
of the best of Megdots into DBT, that's for sure. I'm right
up front there.
I'm also seeing things from a number of additional angles,
and quite frankly, for many things, even an army of skilled
programmers
would not help. Like many of you, I initially thought that
it would be a walk in the park to just "port over" chunks of
Megadots code, and be done with it.
However it isn't quite as simple as that. To start with,
Megadots was written for DOS, so as well as handling what a
specific feature does, and converting that to a different
programming language (which is usually the easy bit), one
has to take care of how Windows reacts, and reacts in around
four to six flavours of Windows at that. In fact this type
of application is one of the few where the program virtually
has to be written for Windows XP - backwards, with emphasis
on the "backwards".
You cannot even begin to imagine the time both myself and
one of Duxbury's programmers have spent just on the simple
issue of the program's installer. 98SE, Millennium, 2000
and even XP Home and Professional, all have their little
"quirks", as does how a user's system in configured, aside
from whether or not they are a work station on a network.
Can you imagine the reaction if Duxbury did what many larger
software houses do, and simply said, "Sorry, if you want
this upgrade, it only works on Windows 2000 upwards"? Well
that's precisely what Microsoft have done with Office 2003.
It will only run on Windows 2000 and above. But then, the
CAN afford to do this.
That said, everyone at Duxbury is conscious that the product
has to be developed and brought up to date. At the same
time, they have to prioritise according to the resources
available. (And I don't just mean program code crunchers)
For example, sitting where I sit, if you had to make a
choice between a feature that would allow users to emboss a
single topic from the Help files, or add a feature to Search
and Replace Styles, who would you put first? (And I bet I
know what your answers would be!) I sometimes feel like
Jekyll and Hyde with these issues. On the one hand, I know
that people like Anne and Fina for example, not to mention
thousands of other braille users, will benefit hugely by
being able to see an explanation of ANY feature under their
finger tips. Yet I can also see how thousands of
transcribers would benefit in being able to quickly replace
Styles.
By the way, both the above features will most likely be in
10.5. (Huge knocking on wood sound is heard from the U.K.)
As DBT becomes more International, it is essential that the
program can recognise thousands of different characters when
it imports files. Moreover, it also has to be decided what
DBT is going to do with them. One very, very simple example
was the introduction of the new European Euro symbol which,
if you have never seen one, looks like a letter C with an
equals sign though it. If DBT didn't handle that, then in
some countries, it would be as serious as not recognising a
Dollar sign.
Sounds a simple problem to deal with (the braille rule took
all of 30 seconds) - until you then realise that a massive
number of the computers in the world can't handle a Euro
sign either.
Well, (more serious knocking on wood sounds) 10.5 will
display lots more characters in it's text editor - though
goodness knows how screen readers will handle them. (Since
I don't believe Unicode has been seriously addressed) By
the way, (knock, knock) there are some additional keystroke
navigational additions to come.
Just to address Christie's keystroke issue, I'll see what I
can do in that specific area, but I just want to say that
everyone is very conscious of keystroke commands. Not just
that they be there, but that they follow, as far as
possible, the same or similar commands in main stream
applications which many are familiar with. That also gets
tricky, resulting in time consuming discussion. For
example, Ctrl + e centres a line in Word, and of course
Embosses text from a DBT braille file. So does this
conflict need to be addressed?
Again, sorry if I have gone on a length here, but as a close
outsider, I wanted to assure you all that much is going on,
even if you don't hear about it from day to day.
George Bell.
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