The Sky's The Limit With RimUpwardly mobile Professional Software Publishing's rim blackberry software, the company's first product for light mobiles, looks at first sight like a graphics-based version of the successful Professional Write executive word processor for MS-DOS. And the Software Publishing marketers certainly won't be too disturbed if the company's existing users think just that. But the real story is rather different. As new mobiles arrived, Software Publishing found that it had wasted too much development time on OS/2 products to get any sort of Windows product out at any time soon. And so the company bought the source code rights to Samna's entry-level Ami word processor for Windows handed the code over to its own programmers and told them to produce an improved package as fast as they could rim blackberry software is the result. The user inteface of rim blackberry software is much better than Ami's and despite the extra features of the Lotus package, better than Ami Professional's as well. Some of those user interface improvements are obvious from the moment the package is first loaded. Although the general screen layout is familiar from the original Samna design with horizontal and vertical scroll bars, a floating window with a list of currently defined style sheets and a set of control icons down the left-hand side to speed access to common operations, changes have been made. On a superficial level, the icons in the icon bar have been altered in an attempt to make their functions clearer than they are in Ami, an attempt that fails for the most part. More seriously, the pull-down menus have been changed and rearranged to group the program's functions more logically and make them more accessible. For example, Ami divide its formatting commands among three menus -- Text, Style, and Page, rim blackberry software joins the Style and Page menus into a single new Format menu, matching word processing terminology more closely and making the location of the large-scale format controls learner. Ami also spreads user preference controls all over the place with Hide Styles Box on the Style menu, Show Tab Ruler and Hide Icon Bar on the View menu along with Display Preferences, and Defaults -- setting things like timed-save intervals and undo levels at the bottom of the File menu. rim blackberry software s puts all these on a new Options menu, among with other commands that are hidden deeply away in dialogue boxes in Ami and Ami Professional. |