From: randy@appsoft.com (Randy Adams)
Subject: Re:  software ports to NeXT (was Re: Attitudes: NeXT users and Sun users)
Reply-To: randy@appsoft.com
Organization: Appsoft, Inc.
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 06:57:49 GMT

In article <1992Aug17.183020.14561@utstat.uucp> philip@utstat.uucp (Philip  
McDunnough) writes:
> Very true. One might note however that smaller companies are often leary 
> at adopting new standards. For example, I use both Draw and Write Now.      
> Write Now does not support the baseline information for inline EPS pasting,
> something which is very important for example if one wisshes to paste an 
> equation from an Editor, such as Equation Builder, into Write Now.
>  
> On the Mac, where the installed base is much larger Write Now has support  
this
> type of feauture (but using QuickDraw) for a long time. On the NeXT, WriteNow
> is basically of no use to anyone who wishes to type technical articles. In
> this case, being part of a bigger circle does seem to help. Mind you
> PasteUp does support this feature as Glenn Reid seems to be aware of the 
> NeXT platform. Having a smaller platform and smaller companies is only of use
> if the developers really know what they are dealing with.
>  
> I'm not trying to put down WriteNow3.0, as it is not out yet, but I have 
> seen nor received no information from Appsoft concerning their intent 
> with respect to the baseline issue. Some clarification would be much 
> appreciated.


Fair enough.  WriteNow, as you probably know, was originally converted to run  
under NeXTSTEP five years ago and has had little creative effort put into it  
since then.  It is 80% written in 68000 assembly language and while it is much  
more solid (crashes less) than Word Perfect and is a real workhorse, it lacks  
many features which people like yourself need.  

When we took over maintenance on the product from NeXT last October we had to  
decide what to do with WriteNow.  Since everyone has WriteNow but few people  
buy it from us (who knows where they get it?) and we aren't deriving enough  
revenue from it to pay for the electricity to power a single NeXT machine:-),  
we knew that we would have to make an investment of our own time and money to  
improve it.

The question was...  Should we rewrite it from scratch or patch up the old code  
base?  Because 68000 assembly code has a low probability of running under NS486  
and because every time we hired an engineer to maintain WriteNow, he/she  
quit:-), we decided to rewrite it from scratch.  We have several engineers  
working full time on the project and it is coming along very nicely. It has a  
feature set which is a superset of the old WriteNow and some wonderful new  
features which you will love.  I think that you fill find it to be a major,  
major improvement over any other Word Processor on the NeXTSTEP platform.  This  
effort represents the first time we have attempted to add value to WriteNow so  
please judge us on this, not what we acquired from NeXT.

The first product which you will see, which we had a major role in, will be  
Appsoft Image which will ship in the next 60 days.  Check it out, it is more  
representative of the kinds of things we will be doing in the future.

Having first programmed under NeXTSTEP in 1986, I have a pretty good awareness  
of the platform.  We have a great engineering staff in-house and under contract  
working on 6 new killer apps which we have yet to ship, three of which are  
going to be available on the archives within the next 60 days.  Watch this  
space - we won't disappoint you.

randy adams
randy@appsoft.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy