Path: kernighan.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Address-It! version 1.5 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 4 Jun 1996 03:51:53 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 303 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <4p0bsp$gki@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) NNTP-Posting-Host: knots.cs.umass.edu Keywords: database, mailing list, address book, commercial X-Review-Number: Volume 1996 Number 14 Originator: barrett@knots.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME Address-It! version 1.5 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Address-It! is an inexpensive commercial product that provides for creating and maintaining mailing lists and address books. It has the capability of printing selected entries from a list or book in several forms including: mailing labels, envelope, rotary file cards, address book, and phone book. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Legendary Design Technologies, Inc. Address: 515 Park Road North #9 Brantford, Ontario N3R 7K8 Telephone: 519-753-6120 FAX: 519-753-5052 E-mail: legend@io.org World Wide Web: http://www.io.org/~legend LIST PRICE The price is about $25 (US). DEMO VERSION None. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE 512 KB RAM required. 1 MB is recommended by Legendary. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 1.3 and later is required. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINES USED FOR TESTING Amiga 1000, 4 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 1.3 Amiga 3000/25, 4 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 3.1 INSTALLATION The Address-It! package is delivered on one common AmigaDOS floppy disk. Installation to a hard drive consists of clicking on the custom "install" icon and specifying where you wish to have the program installed. If you are using AmigaDOS 1.3, there is a box to check to have a special library, req.library, installed as well. The installation process also "installs" some free programs and a sample address book. The free programs include: Screen_Jaeger, a screen capture program; Dotz, a connect-the-dots game; Prism, a low-budget, text- only animator; StripANSI, a program to remove ANSI escape sequences from text files; and VS2PR, a program to convert VideoScape 3D images to PageRender 3D images and vice versa. REVIEW This review is based on a year or more's use of Address-It! to maintain a personal address book, a membership list for a small local organization, and a mailing list for another local organization. The address book and membership list uses both have about 100 entries in them. The mailing list has over 900 entries. The membership list is used and maintained by the reviewer who has many year's experience in computing while the mailing list is used and maintained by the reviewer's wife who is a complete novice in computing. Getting started with Address-It! is quite simple in that you can simply launch the program and start entering names and addresses. Fields are provided for salutation, first name, last name, job title, company, three address lines, city, state/province, mailing code (ZIP or whatever), country, and four lines of comments. There are also fields for three telephone numbers, birthdate, and one user-defined. There are also up to fifteen "tags" which can be applied to each entry; these tags are also user-defined and can be anything which would allow you to retrieve all the entries belonging to one of the tag groups. Once entries have been made into an Address-It! "data base", maintaining the entries is quite simple. Editing of the entries consists of simply typing in the changes when the appropriate entry is on the screen. A slider gadget along the bottom of the main window allows you to move to the approximate place in the list after which you can step to successive entries until the correct one is found. After making any change, moving to another entry "saves" the changes. Address-It! notes that changes have been made and will provide a warning if you try to exit the program without saving the changes to a file. There are gadgets in the main window for deleting and finding entries in the list. If you are working with an existing list, there are also gadgets for creating a new entry and for adding a new entry to the list. The program is automatically in the "add" mode when started by itself or "new" is selected from the "project" menu. Address-It! provides seven different formats in which the list entries can be viewed as selected from the "format" menu. The main window is considered to be the "normal" format in addition to which there is a "browse" format and the five printing formats (see "Brief description", above). The browse format shows the entries in a an entry-per-line form; each entry can be selected or deselected by clicking on the box next to the line or from the "tag" menu. This selection or "tagging" allows selective printing of entries. This covers the high points of Address-It! and its capabilities. All the functions described work in the expected manner and no serious errors have been encountered in their repeated use. There are, however, some warts on the frog. First and foremost, the program is not as bullet-proof as it could or should be for the inexperienced user. In many cases, the program displays the equivalent of requesters, but, unlike true requesters, these equivalents do not lock the underlying layers. It is thus possible for the inexperienced user to mistakenly click on something in an underlying window and thereby cause problems for the program. Some of these problems are of the nature that you have to reboot your machine to recover. A shortcoming for the inexperienced user is the need to click on the "new" button before starting to make a new entry in an existing list and then clicking on the "add" button when the new entry is completed. Failure to do either of these steps or failing to click "add" after each successive new entry results in new entries not being entered into the list. It is also very easy to mistakenly click on the "add" button more than once and have a null entry in the list. Another deficiency is the sorting of the entries. All new entries are always appended to the end of the list. If you wish to have them in some order (any one of eleven different sort orders), you must manually initiate the sorting. The entries will be sorted in very quickly, but, the entries will not be saved in the sorted order. Each time you start the program on an out-of-order list, you must manually sort the list again. A subjective deficiency of the sorting process is that it's case- sensitive. This can be of no consequence unless you have people or businesses with lower-case letters at the beginning of their names and are sorting on those fields. Then you will have Cecil B. deMille located after Efram Zimbalist; you can spend quite some time trying to find Mr. deMille who won't be among the rest of the "D"s where you think he should be. The reviewer got so disgusted with the case-sensitivity and the failure to have the sorted list saved that he produced his own program to sort and save the sorted list. An area where the program is difficult to use is the printing process. The printing preview features are not WYSIWYG, so you are left with a fair amount of trial-and-error work to get things to print the way you want them to appear in hardcopy. This can be very trying when you wish to print an address list which must be aligned to mail labels. The reviewer has found it to be easier to produce special-purpose programs to read the data maintained by Address-It! and produce mailing labels than it is to go through the process needed to do the same thing directly from Address-It! One feature that didn't seem to work as it should is the modem dialing. Attempts to use this feature resulted in the correct number being dialed, but being unable to get the modem off the line when the called party answered. No particular effort was made to resolve this problem since it is of minor importance to the reviewer. Recent changes to the telephone system for calls within one's own area code have further complicated matters. DOCUMENTATION The Address-It! documentation consists of a 36-page, 8-1/2" X 5- 1/2", saddle-stitched booklet. Additional information is provided in a "readme" file on the floppy disk and a three-page supplement to the user's guide for version 1.5. The documentation is reasonably good. It addresses the use of Address-It! from the standpoint of a novice. Thus, early portions of the guide involve explaining what a gadget is, how to click on them, etc. For the most part, the program's use is intuitive enough that very little use is made of the guide except for finding details of some more obscure features. LIKES The product is inexpensive and performs its fundamental tasks in the expected manner. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS Some aspects of the program's sorting of the entries leaves much to be desired. The need to sort the entries each time the program is run after out-of-order additions have been made is a definite shortcoming. The case- sensitivity of the sorting can cause problems if your entries include names starting with lower-case letters ("de Geuss" will be found after "Zimblast", for instance). The program's use of non-requester "requesters" is a definite shortcoming for those who are not familiar with Amiga GUI conventions. It is quite easy to click on a gadget of other than the front "requester" and cause the program to hang or require all sorts of gyrations to recover. The design is not as bullet-proof as it could and should be for the inexperienced user. The method of making new entries could also stand to be made more bullet-proof for the inexperienced user. It is quite easy to fail to save an entry and/or to make a null entry. The null or otherwise corrupted entry is in turn the suspected cause of the sort hanging problem. It has been suggested to Legendary that alphabetic characters be displayed above the slider gadget of the main window so as to be able to more readily get close to a desired entry. When and if this will be added is unknown. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The only other mailing list/address book program I've tried was a PD one which left me with undeletable files. Anything is an improvement compared to that one! BUGS I have repeatedly encountered some unknown situation where the sorting process will hang. I suspect there is a problem with "non-standard" entries such as mistakenly-entered blank names. Legendary claims to be unable to reproduce the problem. VENDOR SUPPORT I have reported the problems as they were found in the early days of working with the program. The original program I received, 1.1, was replaced very early with version 1.5 which had most of the problems corrected. Suggestions made regarding improvements have received a "noted" response, but with no promise of any action being taken. There have been reports of Legendary not responding to e-mail or other communications in a timely manner. My experience in recent months has been similar. Legendary has been the distributor for my genealogy program for the last year. Most of the things noted about Address-It! occurred prior to that agreement being in place. WARRANTY None. CONCLUSIONS I would rate the program as reasonably good. If you want to use only the most basic features of the program, then it is more than adequate and the price is right. If you want to run a commercial mailing list business, then the program is probably too lightweight for that. Give it three stars out of five. COPYRIGHT NOTICE None. REVIEWER Everett M. Greene mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Everett M. Greene (The Mojave Greene, crotalus scutulatus scutulatus) Ridgecrest, Ca. 93555 Path: mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews Web site: ftp://math.uh.edu/pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews/index.html