Hi George,
Many thanks for your thoughtful commentary on the issues involved in
deciding what features may or may not make it into a major update of
DBT. Your extraordinary work on this list and in bringing our interests to
Duxbury's attention are greatly appreciated.
John Luttenberger
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At 12:19 4/21/2003, you wrote:
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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