FAIR SHARES

Dick Pountain/03 December 1997/Idealog 40

It really narks me to hear people running down shareware, and in business circles nowadays the consensus seems to be that shareware is untrustworthy and fit only for anoraks; only software which costs big bucks is to be trusted. My experience is almost exactly the reverse. Of the programs I use most in my everyday work, most of them are now shareware, and I find them more reliable than the big name products. The text editor I'm using to write this column is Textpad32, which has never, ever crashed on me, unlike Word97 which GPFs around three times a week. I produce all my diagrams using a combination of Paintshop Pro and Smartdraw which work wonderfully well and never trash my system configuration the way Corel Draw did last time I looked at it. My web browsings are managed by Nearsite, the best proxy server around, which cost me £30 (I'm scrupulous about paying for shareware that I use regularly, and I've probably spent around £200 over several years on licences; hardly the price of a single big name application.) I'm not saying that all shareware is this good, and you need to shop around, but that's precisely what shareware (though not full price software) allows you to do. The bush telegraph - eg. PC Pro's cover disk - will usually point you to the goodies.

I guess the shareware program that first gained my trust was Bob Wallace's PC Write, which was my sole editor and word processor for most of a decade from 1984. PC Write was lightning fast and easy to use (except for printing, which was a pig in all DOS applications) but its customisability was extraordinary for the time - Wallace exposed most of the internal routines via numeric codes that you could embed in macro scripts, allowing you to do just about anything you could think of, and this 10 years before OLE Automation. Once Windows arrived it took several years to find a worthy successor to PC Write, but Keith MacDonald's Textpad fills its boots perfectly.

TextPad is a good simple text editor, but two features make it really special. One is its extremely powerful regular and replacement expression search facility. A few weeks ago I did a paid commercial data conversion job (from a CD-ROM format into Filemaker Pro) using just Textpad's search and replace functions. The other is its 'Find in Files' command which searches for text across multiple files and returns each matching line as a hyperlink inside Textpad; click on the line you want and Textpad instantly opens that file. I use this, along with my most recent shareware acquistion ZipMagic to maintain a NeXT-style searchable online library. I keep a mass of documents - ranging from the complete works of Shakespeare to the complete columns of Jon Honeyball - in a ZIP archive, and I can search the lot almost instantly for a quote or a reference, thanks to ZipMagic which fools TextPad into seeing the ZIP file as an ordinary subdirectory.

I keep all my previous years email zipped in the same way, yet can still read it instantly. ZipMagic is not entirely bug free, but I find it works remarkably so long as you disable it (just a single click) before sending zips over the net. Keen-eyed observers will note that NT offers this function at operating system level, via compressed directories, and I'd agree that's where it belongs, but Microsoft hasn't got around to putting them into Windows 95 and I don't need NT.

Nearsite is another piece of my personal information management jigsaw. It's really intended as an enhanced cache for your regularly visited web sites, but I don't have any regularly visited sites. Instead there are sites that I bash relentlessly for a week or so while researching an article and then never go near again, but Nearsite works just as as well for that. I can browse quickly offline during the hot week, and the latest version also lets me permanently archive selected white papers for future reference - it automatically gathers up all the html, gifs and other bits, and builds an index for the archive. The latest version also effortlessly imports the Favorites directory from IE3, so I only need to bookmark things in one place. 

Until last week there was a glaring gap in my increasingly seamless superPIM system; I kept hitting university web sites that store all their research papers in Postscript format, and none of the tools I had would read them elegantly. A phone call to DJ, Pro's own Unix guru returned a single word: Ghostscript. It's a big download and a complex product, but it's freeware rather than shareware, and it installs smoothly so long as you Read The F***ing README files carefully. Note that you'll also need to download GSView (its Windows GUI) separately, which gets mentioned almost as an afterthought as macho Unix types prefer to use it from the command line with 57 parameters. Like MS Word (but unlike Acrobat Reader) it supports odd/even page printing to use both sides of the paper. When I first printed out a downloaded technical paper, full of colour diagrams and heaps of beautifully reproduced mathematical symbols, on my HP Deskjet I felt, perhaps for the first time, that the information revolution had finally reached my own desk. 


GETTING THEM: Ghostscript is at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/get503.html. Textpad, Nearsite and Paintshop Pro are on the latest PC Pro cover CD. ZipMagic and Smartdraw have been on previous cover disks.