CompuServe Messages

Thanks for including PaperClip in your list of suggested ports to the Amiga. I would like to pass comment though on the whole subject of ports. It really oesn't make much sense to port even a very powerfull, high quality product from one environment to another _unless_ those machines in _that_ environment have a "gestalt" that works. Let me elaborate. PaperClip on Commodore 8 bit computers has been a great success. When we decied to do an 8 bit Atari version we felt that a straight port wouldn't "work" in the Atari community for a variety of reasons, including the machine itself, the competative environment and so on. What we did therefore was to do a completly new prouct but with the depth, functionality a power of its pregenator. Our Apple IIe/c version, which is just being released is much more closely based on the CBM version and for a variety of reasons this makes great sense on those machines. On the 16 bit machines its a totally different story. While we have a product _called_ PaperClip coming on the Amiga, ST an others, its only resemblance to the original is in name and in that it will have the same "philosophy". It's safe to say that a straight port of virtually any 8 bit product would be poorly received. Because of the high costs and uncertainties of software development, what you _are_ starting to see though is simultanious development on several machines. As one example, BI has a spreadsheet coming out simultaniously this fall on the Amiga, Mac and ST. The spreadsheet itslef is written in 68000 assembler and we have three different teams working on the user interface for each machine. That way each version will have a user interface that takes advantage of each machines strengths. Another example is Thunder!, our real-time spelling checker, expander. It was shipped first on the ST, but the Amiga and Mac versions arn't far behind. A port of this type of product to the Amiga doesn't make sense since the Amiga doesn't have desk accessories per se, so there is some reengineering to be done for the Amiga. Here we have a case where a background task must monitor a foreground task etc etc. I suppose what I'm saying is, a port isn't always a port isn't always the best port. [Michael]