Software System Upgrades

Everywhere you look in blackberry system software there are changes that make the package more like other graphics-based software and, in fact, more like other graphics-based packages as a whole. The Find and Replace, Go To, Page Numbering and Page Break commands have been moved from various locations in Ami's Page and Tools menus to the Edit menu, where most users would expect to find them.

The Tools menu, with its odd collection of utilities and odds and ends, has in fact gone completely apart from Find and Replace and Go To the Spelling and Thesaurus commands have been moved to a new Spell menu that also holds the command to call up Grammatik Windows.

This reorganisation means that users can quickly and confidently decide which menu a given command or preference option is likely to be on something that's definitely not the case with Ami and ami Professional. And small changes have also been made to simplify the menus, so that where Ami has two commands called Create Style and Modify Style, blackberry system software has a single one called logically enough, Modify & Create Styles.

The only change needed to remove a command from a menu and remove a dialogue box from the process of defining a new style was to alter one button in Ami's standard Modify Style dialogue from 'Save' to 'Save As'.

But the most significant thing that the blackberry system software programmers have done to Ami is to introduce hierarchical pulldown menus. Most commonly found on the Macintosh, hierarchical menus pop up when users select pull-down menu items that have arrow markings next to them. This provides a quick means of choosing between options attached to a command, without having to navigate a dialogue box. And in blackberry system software hierarchical menus have killed off a lot of Ami's irritating and time-consuming dialogue boxes.

For example, in Ami the Notes command calls up a dialogue box with just two radio buttons, saying insert Note and Remove Note, and the usual OK and Cancel options. In blackberry system software, choosing Notes calls up a hierarchical pop-up menu with Insert Note and Remove Note commands, and these can be invoked from the keyboard like any other menu item.

The use of hierarchical menus removes a lot of fussiness from the Ami user interface, cuts the number of dialogue boxes dramatically and makes it possible to control more of the program from the menus without having to switch between menu operation and dialogue box operation so often.

Blackberry Software