upgrading or not, and miscellaneous

["Snavely, Deborah" <dsnavely@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello, Framers,

UPGRADING
On the issue of whether 5.5.6 is worth it, I may be able to tell you more
after the end of the month, when I get to attend a writers' meeting with the
Adobe rep for Visa. I know the 5.5.6 release is the first topic on our
agenda. (I think I heard a release date already gone by, like 10/5 or 10/6,
for 5.5.6, but that's not at all definite.) 

As for whether the upgrade is worth it, well...I frankly preferred the 5.1.1
release but then I also prefer using Frame on a Mac. My poor ol'
first-generation PowerMac runs 5.5 well enough but is a slug opening any
dialog that must interact with the OS. (Now accepting hints for speeding up
the go-get-a-cup-of-coffee time it takes for Frame 5.5 to open these dialogs
[Save, New, Open, Import] under MacOS 8.0.) As always with an upgrade, the
new version will want more RAM. Even if it's not supposed to *require* more,
it'll run better if you give it more.

But the biggest problem I have with Frame 5.5 is what it did to the export
RTF filter.  Under Frame 5.1.1, it was easy to start a conversion from Frame
to online help (ForeHelp) by exporting files as RTF. But Frame 5.1.1
included RTF export as one of the Frame-native filters (above the bar),
instead of leaving the task to third parties. Frame 5.5 transfers the task
to the DataViz filters. The results of a conversion attempt from 5.5,
appallingly, varied. Sometimes telling Frame to export RTF eventually hung
the system without completing the conversion. Sometimes it did the job but
took 20 minutes per file. Sometimes it did the job but hung the application,
and one only found out that the export finished by discovering the new RTF
file and opening it to check its contents (after recovering from the hang). 

So I retained 5.1.1 on my system and made saving a file to MIF my first step
in converting to online help, and save to RTF from 5.1.1. It just works
better.

LISTS
I don't know whether anything weird is affecting lists, digests, or what
right now, but about half my subscribed list/digest messages have
disappeared since the beginning of this week. So even though I couldn't
re-sub to the other Frame list after vacation, I wouldn't worry about it any
time soon. 

Deborah Snavely
Senior Technical Writer
consulting at Visa
standard disclaimers apply


-- "Never attribute to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity."  Unknown
-- "Never attribute to stupidity what can be ascribed to ignorance." DS
-- "Online, never attribute to either what can be ascribed to technology."
DS



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