MOVING ON

Dick Pountain/05 March 1997/Idealog 31

Several readers have mailed recently asking whether I've yet bitten the bullet and upgraded to Windows 95, and since it's well over a year ago that I last reported on the contents of my hard drives, this would seem to be a good time to come clean. The short answer is yes, I have now upgraded to Windows 95 (and indeed to Office 97 as well) and so I find myself swimming more or less in the mainstream for once. I didn't upgrade to 95 out of any particular affection for the beast, any more than I stuck with 3.1 so long out of deep admiration - I actually upgraded because I got a new PC that came with 95 already installed.

Years ago I used to pounce on new operating systems eagerly as soon as they appeared, and even partition disks so as to run more than one of them. No more; I find nowadays that a sort of quasi-Buddhist inertia is the best approach to take to software updates. I believe that your PC will tell you when it wants to be upgraded - by falling over even more dramatically than usual - in rather the way that Sioux Indians were supposed to know what day they should die on. In my case the motor died in my C: drive, which I took to be The Sign.

So how do I like Windows 95? Well, er, fine I suppose. It doesn't fall over quite as often as 3.1, it looks pretty, and it handles resources much better than 3.1. I miss having the multiple desktops that Wintools provided, but not enough to be bothered to install a substitute like Backdesk or Norton. Instead I've adopted the MS Office Shortcut Bar as a different (but quite effective) way to group together the applications and subdirectories that I use for various tasks.

There are still a few things that irritate me about 95. For example, the way that the Explorer doesn't support wild-card filters so I can't list just, say, the .TXT files. For that matter, why is there still not a single, unified directory viewer in Windows? You have Explorer with its tree view, My Computer windows without the tree view, File Open dialogue boxes with yet a different format: it's nice that you can drag-and-drop between them all but it would be far more elegant and intuitive (not to say more code-efficient) if they were all the same. I still have problems over file associations, particularly with those loutish applications that grab all the associations for themselves without asking, but since I discovered the wonderful 'Send To' option on the right-click menu these no longer matter much. I've put my own preferred viewers like TextPad, Word, and WebExpress on the 'Send To' submenu, so in effect I can now have multiple file associations.

I would eventually have upgraded to Windows 95 anyway, just to be able to run the Java-enabled 32-bit versions of Netscape and Explorer - all of my research has moved onto the web during the last six months as no-one can be bothered to send you white papers by post any more. The problem with downloading long technical papers full of diagrams in HTML format is that with so many separate bits they can be very hard to archive. The solution turned out to be NearSite, the offline web reader from Info Evolution Ltd (as recommended by our Davey W) which lets me browse my own searchable database of pages using Explorer or Netscape.

As for Office 97, it finally delivers what has been promised for so long, a common macro language VB5 that unifies (almost) all the components, so at last I can get down to some serious tweaking. Word 97 includes some stunning enhancements - like the new 3D abilities of WordArt and the Document Map view - that now make it my favourite layout tool. I still use TextPad to actually write articles as it's much nimbler than Word, and I still keep my main address database in Blackwell's Idealist. I've tentatively exported the latter into MS Outlook, dreaming perhaps of some OLE-automated future, but I'm finding Outlook remarkably hard to like.

I've also had to export all my addresses into USR Pilot Desktop for HotSyncing purposes, but I find that fairly brain-dead too: no phone dialler, no year view, and no automatic link from the To Do list into the Diary. One day I'll find a diary/address book combination that I can live with and that can sync directly with the Pilot (probably the same day I win the lottery.) My only real complaint about Office 97 is that my 16 Mbyte PC started to grind and groan and swap itself to hell whenever I ran it, more or less forcing me to upgrade to 32 Megs (known nowadays in the trade as 'alf-an-'oneyball).     

So, I was feeling fairly happy with my PC life for a while, until I foolishly went to see a demonstration of BeOS at a BCS Advanced Programming Specialist Group meeting. It was the computing equivalent of having sand kicked in your face. The demonstrator casually texture-mapped some live video feeds onto rotating 3D solids, as if it were a Silicon Graphics Onyx. The file system is a built-in database that creates automatic dynamic hot-links between applications. And all this from a small microkernel-based OS running on a mid-priced PowerMac. The rosy clouds parted and I saw my PC again for what it really is - if it were a car it would have a Ford Escort body with a Honda Formula 1 racing engine (restricted down to 30 mph) and be towing three 8-wheel trailers full of sheep....