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Old 12-02-2012, 08:33 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
Posts: 151
"especially in the areas of searching external documents and connecting from one point in a database to another"

On the spot !

"I also find both programs wanting in many significant areas."

Very unfortunately, on the spot again !

( "the current idiots in the political class"

Very unfortunately, you are wrong here, being governed by i*** would be serious enough, the ugly truth being, though, that they very simply have other masters they are accountable to, and that's not their respective country, let alone population. Excursion into politics closed. (We don't wanna be ostracized, nay?) )

"might well give someone somewhere inspiration to take the torch"

Spot-on ! It's not that I don't see this, and indeed, if somewhere (meaning: not on a Mac, please! I couldn't follow, I know some programming and lots of scripting in the Win world, not on Mac!) a top-notch prog arised, pillaging my ideas, I'd more than happy. The only thing that might some day really worry me, is when I will have come to the conclusion that I must realize it myself, go into investing, needing a year, and in month 8 of that same year something really good will come out! That risk is always there, considering that there are some rather good progs there that have done all the basics yet, meaning it'd be easy for them to pass a development-from-scratch. But certainly, UR has done so much, in the past, that their needed effort to make this prog outstanding, would not be that extremely demanding.

"think we've come a long way"

Yes and no. The first about 10 years of Windows were prolific, but not as prolific as they should have been. And since, we've got almost a standstill in concepts, for most sw kinds.

Have a look at Freehand 4 (1993 if I remember well, or was it 1992?) - look at its replacement, Illustrator today: 20 years of conceptional standstill, except for minor details, whilst the technical possibilities would have skyrocked).

Have a look at Word 2010, and at Word 5 (or at WordPerfect in that era) - even today, Word needs one of two different add-ins in order to do "proper outliner", sort of, or compare with XyWrite (from 1982 on - incredibly powerful and thus the standard in press rooms all over the world then (I used it for years then, would never have touched on Word: was about 200 times quicker than Word was on my slow and overpriced notebooks then, and was scriptable - in fact, scripting XyWrite macros was the very first scripting I did in my life!).

Have a look at Excel today (good ecosystem around btw, but that's not their fault): Compare with Lotus 1-2-3 then (yeah, there is Resolver One, today, but you better be a programmer in order to use it, let alone take advantage of its special capabilities), compare with Lotus Improv, a sensational concept being buried then for "external" reasons.

The same for DTP sw. (Corel Ventura for the poor, Framemaker for the rich, and then even PageMaker got a mark-up language, only its very first (Mac) didn't have one and was sub-par because of that!)

The same for PIM's - mine (and yes, it was object-oriented) had clones, tags and all (whilst most of today's don't), 15 years ago (and some other also had then).

So, what we see, is a near-standstill in sw "architecture" or "engineering" (both not meaning the development here, but APPLIED expertise, i.e. NEW RESULTS, new intelligence coming from the pc, and then, re "internal excellence", since memory chips ain't 2,000 bucks for 10 mega anymore and there being multiplied processing power, there's been total sloppiness with memory, processing power or any other resources, within programming), except on the integrational level (thanks to the web), but re integration, have a look back at that favorite of mine when it comes to defunct sw: Framework, pure genius (from 1983 (that makes it THIRTY YEARS NOW, kudos going to Robert Carr especially) - so don't prematurely assume MS had invented the Office Suite! ...
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