#final copy II
27 messages in this thread
Roll Call,
well i ordered Final Copy II yesterday… who's using it now???
i'd like to put together a list of experenced users just in case i have
some troubles.
-mark-
Mark –
Just post your questions here. You'll receive more answers than you ever
imagined. (And if you don't, E-mail me. I'll do what I can).
Welcome to the world of FCII (hopefully you bought release 2!)
🙂
/7
//\ob …on Amiga via Autopilot from Northeastern PA…
Howdy Mark,
I think you will enjoy FC2,I've had it since April and it does a good
job in the word proc. arena. You've probably seen that there is an upgrade
now- Final Writer, I received a brochure on it from Softwood today.
Hey, I'll trade you some smoke and brush fires for some of that 'cool'
weather you're having :^{) What a mess it has been, and all of it arson
related, too.:^{(
C-ya
Edgar
Flying on AP at Warp 9 over Ojai
hey there edgar,
none of that smoke and fire has come your way has it?
i borrowed a copy of FC 1.1 from a friend and thats what sold me on FCII.
it gave me the best output from my BJ200… i hope to have it here
tomarrow… we will see.
figures i buy a piece of software and they upgrade it the day i buy
it…!!!! how much diff is there in the two versions???
well heres some COOOOOOOOL breazzzes your way.. 27 here this morning
just like i like it. nice and cool in the shop where i work..
i hate working on cars (saturns) in the summer. yuk.
catch you later,
-mark-
Mark,
actually, Softwood says that Final Writer is targeted at a seperate
market, as near as I can tell, the ProPage/Pagesetter crowd. I'll be
picking it up as it'll do everything I'll ever need, all the way up to my
dissertation.
Brian
bjbart@watnxt01.ucr.edu
Isn't ProPage a full DTP program? FinalWriter is still a word
processor, though it is a well-featured one. You still can't do
complex layout, only X equal-width columns across. From the 24 hours
I've looked at FinalWriter (I paid for UPS Red), it looks like it
does most things that WordPerfect 4.1 did — but that is nothing like
what WordPerfect 5 or 6 do.
My fondest hope is that SoftWood will be willing to work closely with
Soft-Logik to make PageStream able to import FinalWriter documents
very well — preserving tags and such so that I could edit drafts in
FinalWriter and produce camera-ready output with PgS.
We haven't received a copy of FinalWriter yet, so I can't say for sure if
PageStream 2.2 will import FW documents. They may have changed their file
format. Hopefully, Softwood will send out updated copies to other developers
soon if there are changes so that we can continue to support their files. We
try to work closely with other software developers to ensure seamless
compatibility, but some Softwood programs, notably Proper Grammar and Electric
Thesaurus, cannot exchange information with our programs via the clipboard,
because they do not read the clipboard properly.
Cheers,
Michael @ Soft-Logik Publishing Corp.
I've just heard about FW from reading some of the posts around here. I
gave up on Softwood after Pen-Pal failed to meet my expectations. Since
then I've been using ProWrite for simple letters and as a word processor
for output with PPage 4.0. In order to get GOOD output from ProWrite, I
need to go to PPage. I just couldn't see spending for FC when I can do
things now with those two progs. It looks though like FW is getting the
features that I need to put PPage back where it belongs, page layout vice
a printer for my more important letters. If anyone already has some
reviews of this product, I'm sure there are quite a few of us who are
thinking of the purchase.
Later.
From the Far East…
Forrest
That's the part that worries me. If Final Writer is targeted at a
separate market, what are the upgrade options going to be for their other
2 WPs? So far it looks like they would either upgrade FW only or
introduce a fourth WP! This would leave PP and FCII as the state their
art 🙂
regards, Lu on AutoPilot downunder
Lu Beranek says, "That's the part that worries me. If Final Writer
is targeted at a separate market, what are the upgrade options going
to be for their other 2 WPs? So far it looks like they would either
upgrade FW only or introduce a fourth WP! This would leave PP and
FCII as the state their art :-)"
It's an old ploy started by Gold Disk many years ago. Come out with
a package, run it through a year or so of upgrades and then dead end
it and call your next upgrade a new "Professional" (or whatever)"
level program. That is why I don't support Gold Disk and it is the
same reason I'll dump Soft Logic. These little companies want to
know why they can't make it to the big time, well when they start
acting like big time companies they might get the respect and
treatment!
Captain Bieser – sit'n on my deck chair cruise'n over Wisconsin In my
genuine-old fashion-authenic-Steam Powered Aero-Plane
What do you care what they call it, as long as they bring it out and give
you an upgrade path to the new program?
//
-Karl \X/ Amiga and Autopilot: The *only* way to fly!
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
1) SoftWood, not Soft-Logik, makes FC and FW.
2) Big companies make their livings on upgrades. Look at MS, Borland,
WP, etc. Their upgrades cost as much or more than new apps cost on
the Amiga.
I applaud SoftWood for figuring out how to get enough income to
provide the best native Amiga word processor. Amigan's won't pay
even $150 or $200 for a good word processor, they're always looking
to buy something for $50. SoftWood has sold them a $150 quality
program in three yearly installments 🙂
Softwood did not drop FCII, they could have simply called FW —
FCIII. But this would have foced some users to upgrade their
computer.
FW requires a hard drive, WB 2.0 or higher, & 2MB RAM.
FC will still use WB 1.3, 1MB RAM, and no hard drive.
To Upgrade from FC to FW is $55 (until 12/5/93) or $100 from Pen Pal,
not bad for an "upgrade" if you have the requirements.
How many FC users who do have the FW requirements will not upgrade?
I would think that number will be low. In fact SoftWood has stated
"We know that most Final Copy owners will want Final Writer."
How many FC users who do not have the requirements for FW, will miss
the features that FCII will not have? Again these are floppy based
users and still using WB 1.3. I quess SoftWood feels this number is
low.
Look at WordPerfect, a big time company, left Amiga high and dry.
Just at the point when they were working on the next upgrade. I do
not respect WordPerfect for leaving a product that I was supporting.
At least SoftWood and Gold Disk are still supporting this platform —
which is not the popular choice for DTP to begin with.
If you like a product, support it. Our choices are limited to begin with.
It does not make sense to tell a company go away, because you came
out with a new – improved product and changed its' name. If that
were the case no one would be here supporting Commodore's Amiga line,
who with the AA (AGA) machines left all earlier users with no chance
to upgrade — expect to buy a new machine.
OTOH, I have as many DTP programs as I can use. I needed a stable
post-script capable word processor to replace excellence! which is no
longer supported. FC-II is in the same class as excellence! but in
some ways excellence! was better (built in grammar checker, easier
save to ascii, bold and italic were esy to use – no need to load an
entirely seperate font to get what many people consider a style) and
in some areas its better – more straight-forward PostScript font
support, faster display update, pprinting preferences that attach to
the document…
So, having DTP already adequately covered, it sounds as if I am in
the class of the floppy users with my 1.5 gig of HD, 18 megs of ram,
68040, 2.o gig dat, CDROM, 128 meg MO? The report that FC II is
being relegated to 1.3 floppy users means that Softwood is obviously
not going to support my wordprocessor needs. Guess your suggesting I
stick with excellence! or maybe I'll just have to slip into PageLiner
more. :^{
wmc – via Autopilot!
Huh? FinalWriter isn't much closer to DTP than FC. They added EPS
support, text objects and object grouping.
FinalWriter does have a lot of important word processing features.
Automatic TOC, Indexing, Outlining, etc. Better user interface (except
that they still haven't fixed our annoyance about bold/italic as a
seperate font — that is a UI issue, not a technical issue). FW does
allow you to save printing preferences with a document (you can configure
a dozen things as savable with document or not).
Dale Larson
– An Amiga Software Engineer with less and less time on his hands.
Dale,
I stand corrected. Someone earlier on in this thread mentioned that FW
was targetted more at the ProPage Pagesetter folks.
BTW, the guy I spoke to today at Softwood indicated that you could create
a "style" called bold that involved preloading and switching the font to
bold on a section of text with a user key combination or user menu item.
He mentioned that is what he did since the other way was such a pain. (So
why don't they fix it?) A minor annoyance, though if all the rest of the
stuff lives up to the ad.
wmc – via Autopilot!
Everything seems to live up to the add. I'd be perfectly satisfied if I
could get pictures to float with text rather than being stuck in the same
place on the same physical page no matter what happens to the text.
Dale Larson
– An Amiga Software Engineer with less and less time on his hands.
Wayne,
With all that power behind your Amiga, are you telling me you have not
upgraded your Workbench from 1.3 and still need FC II?
I am suggesting is if you need a powerful word processor and if you like
SoftWood's programs — upgrade your FC II to Final Writer for $55 and
upgrade your workbench.
To drop SoftWood because; they came out with a better word processor, and
gave it a new name — is not a good reason.
Yes, companies like Commodore have relegated WB 1.3.
No, SoftWood has not abandoned the Amiga and
the need for a better word processor.
Joe Maulucci >>> Accadia Electronic Arts
Flying a A4000/040 34RAM!
Absolutely not. I am runnig 2.1 with FC II in a test mode to see if it
can replace excellence! I am also looking for a straight ascii type thing
to replace Platinum Works word processor (essentially Scribble!) for fax
asci fax prep. I know FC II wqill do it, but having to remember to export
as ascii instead of just save with an ascii mode check box or the like
activated and saved with the doc, makes it too easy for dumb 'ole
distracted me to mess up.
My complaint was what someone said about FC II being only for floppy based
1.3 users. It ain't so! I guess the facetious tone in my type didn't get
through the modem :^}. My other complaint is that I just laid out $79 for
Final Copy II/2 a couplke of momths ago and just installed it a month ago,
now I gotta spend another $55 to upgrade making the excellence!
replacement cost $134 pluys two shipping fees, and I still don't end up
with integrated grammar checking or bold/italic type styles.
Basically, I'm having reservations that maybe, before I lay out more money
for the excellence! replacement, I should try to see if their are any
other canditates that come closer. This, BTW, has nothing to do with the
merits of FC II/FW taken alone on their won merits. Its just when compared
to wexcellence! I would have to change some of my "wp habits" to less
efficient ways of operating, and I'm reluctant to pay money to put up with
what are, admittedly, minor irritations.
wmc – via Autopilot!
When I want to fax, I just run GPFax and then hit "print" from FW.
Why ASCII? Yuck.
Dale Larson
– An Amiga Software Engineer with less and less time on his hands.
ASCII faxing??? With GPFax, I just print and a box pops up asking me for
the phone number of where the fax should go to… of course, I already
have it in the phonebook, so I just select it.
-Jonathan
// Amiga online via Autopilot
\\// MAC Quadra 700 & 486 emulation via Amiga!
What are you Mr. Pessimist tonight or what?
Patrick White
"Burning the midnight Toast"
A applaud Softwood for trying to make some money.. I would have paid
$200 for the upgrade. I shelled out nearly a grand at work for the
PC I use there and I get just as much productivity out of my Amiga
and it's <$400 programs!
Lu,
it doesn't worry me too much. As I've progressed up the WP/DTP
ladder, Softwood has been with me every step of the way, offering a
package that is a quarter of the cost of the competition (mind you,
the competition is NOT the Amiga market).
Furthermore, so what if FCII and PP are dead-ended? I still use
both, even given their little warts, simply due to the fact that they
are the best at what the do, for my purposes. I've easily received
my money's worth from them and they will continue to serve in the
future, so everthing is gravy at this point.
Frankly, I'm a bit confused with your response. I've paid a heck
of a lot more cash for applications that do much less for me, and
yes, this is in the Amiga market. Much more so on the IBM side. Are
you saying that these applications suddenly drop dead upon the
arrival of yet another program? Even Pen Pal saw an update to bring
it up to AmigaDOS 2.0. I found that suprising at the time as it
surely wasn't yielding Softwood any revenue to speak of, especially
at the price of $5 for the update, which I must remind you is not the
cost to update comprable products.
Oh well, I don't think we'll see eye to eye on this.
I think the problem there's a problem with fragmenting a small market.
In the humungous clone market, you really only have 3 top end WPs, 3
or 4 medium and the rest are tadpoles. Now if one particular company
in the Amiga market brings out a number of WPs each of which is
radically different, fine. But if each has a few different features
or ways of looking at things, this seems to be just a market share
increase ploy i.e. short term gain.
I guess some people are quite happy hopping from product to product,
re-learning some of the ways of doing things. In my case, I'd rather
pick what I think is the best product and hopefully stick with it as
it gets better and better in some upwardly compatible way (hopefully
in response to `I want this' demands from its users).
Also you may be lucky that Softwood have been with you every step of the
way. From the more remote distance of Australia I have been trying to
find out my registration status (I bought my copy of FCII second hand) for
about 2 months. I have left about 4 messages here to that effect. I
realise that most companies are resource challenged at the moment so I'm
not casting aspersions at Softwood
Can you imagine what Write and File would be like now if all the effort
put into making the others had been spent on upgrading it instead? I may
may have an over active imagination but my thoughts are that MS Word would
look like the poor boy on the block in comparison 🙂
regards, Lu on AutoPilot downunder
Lu,
have you tried leaving an CMail message as well as posting in their
Vendor forum? It just might get more attention. At least that has been
my experience with other software vendors.
As for the problems of hopping from product to product, I generally
haven't experienced that. Softwood seems to have their own set of
procedures which feels consistent from product to product. Also, as I
jump from PC to Next to Amiga, I've gotten pretty flexible in my approach
as well. My only pet peeve is that I like the shell commands to be the
same from system to system. I've managed to work around that using the
combination of 4DOS on the PC and C-Shell on the Amiga. I guess I'm not
totally flexible <grin>.
Lastly, as for fragmentation of the market, well, you have to really
have a market. The market for Amiga WP/DTP software (and other software
and hardware) in the US isn't very large to begin with, but if you look at
that market, you only have about three large players to begin with, and I
seem to recall that one has just dropped out, as did Word Perfect, who had
a heck of a lot more resources than any Amiga software company. It really
is a niche market where developing a following is absolutely necessary to
survival. I believe that is the Softwood strategy. The have developed
their niche and as they develop the capital resources, expand the niche in
incremental steps. As do many of the successful Amiga companies. Supra
and GVP come to mind as well for following such an approach.
While none of these companies has received any one single large cash
purchase from me, they all have received significant sums of my cash over
time. A much different tack than had been the previous practice in the PC
market. Come to think of it, given the cut-throat nature of the PC market
today, e.g. competitive upgrades, I think they are switching to this
approach as well. Some of the offers I've gotten in the mail from PC
companies are ridiculously low priced, based solely on the hope that I'll
recommend their product. They seem to have this odd notion that I'm a
system-administrator, or somesuch <grin>. I assume it is my subscription
pattern that is giving them that notion.
Brian
bjbart@watnxt01.ucr.edu
Brian,
I've actually tried leaving both CMail and Vendor forum messages.
Not knowing whether there is 1 person trying to cover 100 messages/day
from 5 services in their spare time prevents me from slagging off at them
but I was hoping as a minimum `this is the wrong place…contact X'.
Could be done as a macro when you think about it.
I think what I'm getting at is that if you're into the Softwood WP system
you're not too badly off (although I think some of the features I've seen
in Write and File e.g. they should have kept). If you're coming in from
the cold, however, you may finish up confused and wonder whether the
product is solid. Sure MS Word jumps from version 2 to 6 and from
processor to publisher but it's still MS Word not Ultimate Publishing
Tycoon Maestro (UPTYM for short :-)). And so it is for most programs that
hang around. For experienced users UTMOYRS (use the manual only if you're
really stuck), it's no problem except where some programmers insist on
doing it a different way to everybody else – the early WORD was a prime
example, it took 2 of us 3 hrs to work out something relatively simple and
yes, we did have a manual. Probably 3/4 of people I know approach a
system on the basis of if they hit the wrong key sequence, they, and the
entire room will be atomised. Not the sort of people you want to start
changing names on :-).
In Softwoods case, I would be more worried about establishing a following
for a cutting edge WP on the basis that if the A5000 rumours are true and
it will run Windows NT, a lot of people (including a surprising number of
Amigoids) may change to MS Word. It's interesting the slippery debate
that goes on this area, you have people switch from hardware power (486, 6
meg RAM, 200meg hard drive etc.) and SOOOO cheap switch to cutting edge
programs argument on it being pointed out this makes it only as fast as a
base grade Amiga 1/4 of the price. Then if I mention I've had problems
with the cutting edge programs (inc. Windoze), it's said that I must have
set things up wrong SIGH sure all 15 to 20 of them in different areas
etc.
Wasn't NEXT supposed to be a perfect system with perfect programs? 🙂
regards, Lu on AutoPilot downunder