Test reports

Test Reports

1. Little Helpers for Everyday Amiga Usage

Oh boy, what a heat! My fan gives his utmost, but in spite of that sweat pours down my forehead. I only hope I don't get a shock while typing these lines - water and computers don't hit off too well ;). And with this sweat-soaked introduction a cordial welcome to the little helpers for August. This time there are test reports for StopMenu (Amiga Arena Special Edition) and DocDatatypes.

Lots of fun while reading!

StopMenu:

Amiga Arena have again provided a registered shareware program just for "nothing". In brief: StopMenu is a clone of the well-known Windows 9x start menu. StopMenu is not the first one of its kind, but in my opinion it is one of the better and above all more comfortably configurable start bars.

After downloading and unpacking the archive of 287kB from the homepage of Amiga Arena, the installation can be started with the installer script. During the installation the graphics set to be used later on can be selected. Available are icons in NewIcon and GlowIcon style. If the Amiga user has no OS3.5/OS3.9 system installed or if an OS3.1 system has no NewIcon system, additionally the necessary system modules are installed automatically on the computer. On the whole the installation runs quite smoothly. It must be noted that the keyfile (which by the way is registered to "Amiga Arena Visitor") is not copied during the installation. This has to be moved out of the directory "key" into the newly created StopMenu directory.

After successfully finishing the installation, the computer must be started anew. When the Workbench is available, StopMenu can be evaluated. Or not? But StopMenu is installed! You must move the mouse-pointer to the lower border of the screen and the startbar will appear ;).

The standard startbar is configured in a way that on nearly any computer working with a normal Workbench installation first tests can be made right away.

Beside the actual start ("Stop"-) menu in the standard configuration there are four additional startbar menus available.

There are "Commodities", which represent a complete replacement for the program "Exchange", "Preferences", which permit to start (nearly) all preference programs installed in the Prefs directory and "Screens" and "WBWindows", which can be used for the management of screens and Workbench windows. A nice feature of the "Screens" menu allows Amiga screens to be saved as IFF graphics.

On the very right side there is a little digital clock. After clicking on the digital display another program module appears: The "StopMeter". This shows the complete current date (week-day, date, time) in the titlebar, and bargraphs of the current CPU, Chip memory and Fast memory loads.

StopMenu provides two preferences: The first one is the adjuster for the graphical appearance and for several program parameters (StopMenu: Stop/Program/Prefs);

The second one is an editor for user-specific menu entries (StopMenu: Stop/Program/Menu edit).

With the help of the preferences several graphics styles for the many buttons and menus as well as font styles of the denominators can be set. StopMenu is able to display the setup of Win95 or MagicWB (XEN), but there are available single- or double-framed user gadgets as well. Beside several more program settings the above mentioned additional startbar menus can also be enabled, disabled or adapted to your own requirements. Especially with heavily filled Prefs directories you should spend some extra time with the configuration of the "skip list" of the Preference menu, because otherwise it can cause difficulties in the display.

This skip list serves to ban particular preferences which are not used very often (or never) from the display in the Preferences menu. Similar skip lists exist for the Screens and the WBWindows startbar menu.

With new menu entries StopMenu distinguishes between CLI and Workbench programs, scripts, program-internal commands and graphical elements, with omitted menu positions ("spaces") or a limiting line. Submenus (and additional menus in submenus) can be defined with the type-definition "Menu". To each menu entry a freely selectable icon can be assigned. This is done with a comfortable selector. Unfortunately this did not work correctly on my OS3.9 system; a preview of the used icon was not visible. But on an OS3.1 system with NewIcons installed there were no problems.

Another clear fault is the display of the Amiga menus of the preference programs. Both on the used OS3.9 system (040/CGFX) and on the OS3.1 system (030/AGA) the menu items were written in black on a black background, which certainly does not make much sense, because it is unreadable. This is not a big deficiency, because all menu items appear as buttons in the relevant settings program, but the overall impression of StopMenu is spoiled a bit by this. Possibly this shortcoming can be cured with a patch program, as there is in MagicMenu, but I did not test this.

About the system requirements there is nothing said in the English manual in AmigaGuide format. But in my opinion StopMenu should indeed run on any Amiga with OS3.1 and 2MB RAM without problems. To display the icons with decent colours, a Workbench with minimum 32 or even better with 256 and more colours is advised.

DocDataTypes:

With the many varying text formats which the different Wintel and Mac text processors have heaped upon mankind, the Amiga user cannot do anything but hit the delete button. A solution, even if quite unpretentious, is DocDataTypes by Amarpreet Singh Munde.

This collection, consisting of 9 different datatype extensions, makes it possible for MultiView and any other text program having datatype support, at least to extract the pure text data from those files. For this purpose DocDataTypes supports more than 20 file formats of the most different origins, and version numbers, too. Beside of the indeed best known types - Word (DosWord V4-V5.5, WinWord V1-2000, MacWord V4-98), WordPerfect (V4-V9, Amiga WordPerfect V4) and AmiPro (1-3) - there will be displayed or, better said, converted to pure ASCII text exotic formats like XyWrite, QL Quill and Palm db TEXt DOC. Unfortunately pictures, font and paragraph specifications, tables and other layout objects are lost. Anyone, who can do without such "tittle-tattle" should have look at DocDataTypes.

The installation is easily done by an installer script and it is very fast (provided the user level is set to "Beginner"). After a reset all mentioned datatypes can be viewed with MultiView without problems. If DocDataTypes does not appeal to you, you can remove it with the same installer script.

The unregistered version of DocDatatypes only displays the first page of a document. But this is sufficient for a detailed test and Multiview displayed the texts (with the limitations mentioned above) without problems.

About the system requirements nothing said in the English manual in AmigaGuide format. OS3.0 is a must because of the datatype system and some KB of free memory should be available on the computer, too.

I got a jolt when I realized the registration fee: 20 Pounds Sterling? I am not quite sure, but this must be some 30 Euro. For a shareware this is not a decent price.

Well, so much for this month. I hope next month we will have a few more reviews, this time I unfortunately was quite out of time for testing and writing. Proposals, critics, praise and what else you may think of always are very welcome.

Until next time,

Christian Aichinger <christian@aakt.de>