From: oster@well.sf.ca.us (David Phillip Oster)
Subject: Re: FaxSTF questions
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 06:14:56 GMT

I use it and hate it. My work macintosh is connected to my gateway macintosh
via AppleShare, but when I make the FaxSpool folder on my work machine be
an alias for the one on the gateway, FaxSTF refuses to use it. If they
did this right, then all the machines on the appletalk net could just
write spool files to the machine tthat actually has the fax connected to it.

(I am not violating license agreements, since I have one fax machine, one 
copy of the STF software in use at a time, I just have a home office
netwokr of multiple machines because I am a software developer.)

The gateway mac also has Appltelk Remote Access. Why can't STF detect that
an incoming call is a data call, not a fax call, and hand the serial port
off to Appltelk Remote Access, but receive fax calls as they come in.

Because I use a single phone line for a voice answering machine and for STF.
I'm always having to turn off the modem to talk to someone who called in on
that line. Then, when I go to fax, STF puts up an alert to tell me the fax 
software isn't turned on.  To turn it on I must
1.) Open the chooser (and wait)
2.) Select Fax as the output device (and wait)
3.) Press the setup button
4.) click on the Fax software icon
5.) only now do I get a small radio button to turn the sftware ion.
Often it doesn't work the first time, but does the second time.

Decent software wouldn't even give me the initial alert, it would just plain
turn the software on.
-------
From a user inteface design standpoint, critical, common com manfds like
enabling the software, and commanding it to answer the phone are buried deep,
and given interfaces like: one choice of a set of radio buttons, anfd one
choice of a pop up menu.

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STF's address book uses a modal dialog, and has no import/export capability.
This makes it a pain to use in conjunction with my main address book software.
(Address Book Plus, from Power Up software, which I think is a fine peice
of work, even though I wrote it.)

STF's export of fax data is poor: you get three choices:
1.) a 72 dpi macpaint file.
2.) a 72 dpi PICT file.
3.) a 200x100 dpi TIFF file.
The choice that would be really useful, that would let people edit faxes
in standard phot retouching software like Photoshop or Digital Darkroom
that is 200x200 dpi PICT file, is absent. It would be trivial to write this,
but STF doesn't support output file format plug-ins.  The three STF does
provide are all useless for my purposes.

-------
In the fax dialog, you select the recipient by dragging the name from the
address book list to the recipients' list. If you change your mind about
a recipient, you'd expect that you'd just drag the recipient out of the
destination list.  Doesn't wok. Instead there is an extraneous delete button,
the same size as the FAX, Help, Cancel, and Preview buttons, that unlike the
other buttons, which refer to the current print/fax run, refers to the
currently selected item in the destination list.

Many of the uses of ListManager in the STF software do not follow Apple's
user interface guidlines for the use of the shift key and command key, but
then, Finder and Font/DA Mover get this wrong also.

It is not that the software is bad. (Although it does crash about one
fax in 8.) It is just that I had assumptions I didn't even know I had about
how it should have been designed from experience with things like SHIVA
net modems, mac printers, and mac applications, and STF often seems to do
things in ways I never expected.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps