CompuServe Thread

OK–It'll be in the next three messages (I hope). Here are my thoughts/impressions of Online!: Overall, it is useable, but decidedly unfriendly. In fact, it is the most unfriendly menu-driven program I have encountered. The menu structures invite mistakes. For example, the Archive menu for calling up parameters and phone numbers does not remember which one was last selected. Since you must re-select the menu after making changes (e.g. correcting phone no, etc) you run the risk of not remembering, or mis-selecting the name, thereby wiping out something else unintentionally. [To add insult, the program asks if you're sure, but offers no feedback to help]. There are other examples of a similar nature. To top it off, the manual impressed me as condescending in tone, and lacking substantial vital information such as what control codes result in what action on the terminal. After all, when you buy a terminal program, you're buying a terminal, and should be able to discover how to clear the screen, address the cursor etc. Quoting other terminals is never adequate since the emulation cannot be complete, in any case the info should be included. Some of the functions are brain damaged. One common use would be for downloading programs or files from other system (e.g. Compuserve). Online! accesses the disk EVERY block—even for Xmodem transfers. This is exterme dumbness, since xmodem blocks are 128 bytes long, and the minimum disk sector is 512 bytes. This means that the program causes the disk to be accessed 4 times more often than necessary, and even more since any reasonable program would buffer, then write several sectors at a time. [To be fair, there is a way around this by using the ram: disk, but its a pain, and only discovered by accident.] The compuserve B-protocol is unreliable on uploads. Approximately 50% of my attempts have arrived garbled, with no warnings messages or other indications of trouble. The Amigaforum sysops indicate that this is common among those who attempt to use Online!'s B-protocol. [Downloading has been reliable however.] The capture buffer function is not reliable–frequently a buffer will simply not be saved to disk–dropping 64K or more from what you have been paying to download. The character map is an interesting feature. You can map any character to any other for keyboard, screen and serial line. The mechanism for doing so is so cumbersome, though, that it is unfeasible if you need to map more than a couple of characters. What I wanted to do was mask off the eigth bit–to do it would take 128x3x128 mouse clicks–and then you can easily lose it thanks to the unfriendly menus. (Incidentally, getting the eigth bit causes the display of 128 characters that you probably didn't know that your amiga had–and causes a lot of swithching from 7-bit to 8-bit modes.) Finally, occassionally the program simply goes away….no Guru messages, nothing. The mouse still selects menus, but nothing happens, and no characters are sent to the serial port. As I've said, I have been using the program, but I can't recommend it. On the down side, I don't know of another that I can. I'm holding out a lot of hope for Starterm 3.0 as the bugs get shaken out. It's basic structure is nice. Strange to say, I'm not nearly as down on Online! as some folks. One local user published an article in the local Amiga User Group newsletter saying basically that he could get it to do NOTHING. I can sympathise, it wasn't easy getting a working modus operandi (sp?). Hope this babble has helped. -Regards, Rod