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From: cmcmanis@sun.uucp (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Spreadsheets & stuff
Message-ID: <6672@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 28-Aug-86 17:20:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.6672
Posted: Thu Aug 28 17:20:42 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 29-Aug-86 05:47:54 EDT
References: <223@plx.UUCP>
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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> 
> 	Does anyone out there have any opinions on some of the amiga
> 	spreadsheets on the market.  I just bought Maxiplan and wish
> 	I had not!  Did they write this thing in Lattice or Manx?
> 
> 	I realize that 1/2meg is not enough for the amiga but running
> 	out of memory when you only have 20 columns and 4 rows is 
> 	ridiculous!  Furthermore, I *HATE* to wait for the pointer to
> 	move when I "mouse around the sheet" (does that make sense?)
> 	can this symptom be remidied with more megabytes? It's really
> 	annoying since you always "miss" the cell you want to select.
> 
> 	Maybe I'm being unfair but I expect better performance than
> 	what I've seen. In terms of features, Maxiplan seems great
> 	but it performs like a dog!
> 
> 	Any Comments?
> 
> 	Ed Chaban

Some comments : MaxiPlan and VIP professional both soak up the memory.
Probably because they were written in C, Lotus 1A on the PC was written
in assembler.  Unfortunately this is a pretty good reason why the PC
software is as fast and memory efficient as it is, first you only have
640K period, second you either have to access it in 64K chunks or write
your own memory management routines because for the longest time no
high level language could manage that feat. Now on the Amiga you have 
this nice flat address space and it is easy to write simple code for
it unfortunately that code is often bloated as a result. So until
someone writes a spread sheet in assembler I doubt it will live up to
the potential of the machine. 

Additional comment, I have the Alegra 512K board (yeah!) and MaxiPlan
runs fine with it, can't say I like their color scheme though. You 
can save memory by selecting the menu item "limitied colors" or some
such rather than the extended colors. Since this reduces the number of
bitplanes used it makes text rendering much faster. One thing I wished
for in 1.2 but now looks like 1.3 or a custom library ioss "FastText"
no kerning, no proportional spacing , no fancies, just damn fast. Of
course Charlies Heath's  TxED is awfully fast so it must be possible.


-- 
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.