#AP
John,
While the author of AutoPilot did the editor part of Whap!, he did not do
the communications part. AutoPilot is not an update to Whap! It was
written from scratch by a different programmer, and he did not even have
access to the source code for Whap! while he wrote it (except for the code
to the Whap! editor, which was his, of course.)
Autopilot has many advantages over Whap! Among them:
.Multitasking. As soon as AP has moved from Mail to a forum, you can
begin reading and answering your mail, for example.
.Unlimited forums. Whap! allowed only ten. AP lets you have as many as
you want.
.History, with utilities. You can automatically keep all the messages
from a forum in a .HST file. This lets you press a 'parent' button to
find the parent to a message you are reading, and you can back up to the
earliest message of the thread so long as it is in your HST file. You can
answer messages in the history file, too. And the provided CLEANUP
utility will prune the history file to the number of days you set when you
are ready to prune it a bit. This is an extremely nice feature that is
hard to appreciate until you actually have it.
.Support for Internet and FAX abilities of Cmail.
.Handling of uploading and downloading is vastly improved. Example: if
you are uploading or downloading and your call is interrupted, AutoPilot
saves your place and begins the upload or download with the file that was
interrupted. You don't have to do any editing or other management of the
files. To me, this is a MAJOR feature.
.Catalogs – when you add to an AP: catalog, it assimilates the new
descriptions into your old catalog, removing any duplicates that might
have crept in. You can search the catalogs by keyword, saving lots of
time in looking for a file, too. There are other features that don't come
to mind at the moment, but catalogs and up/downloading are much nicer.
.Download single file. If you are reading messages and see a file
mentioned that you want, you can select a menu item right then and there,
type in the name of the file, and next time you sign on, it will be
downloaded for you. Awfully handy. And it is not really just one file –
you just name the files one at a time. If you see a second one you want,
you can use the same feature for the second, etc.
These are just a few of the new or improved features. There are dozens
more. Every few days, I see a list of new or improved features. There
must be hundreds of them!
—Betty