Tips and Updates
This is the place to find supplemental documentation, the latest on
bugs and other problems, and software updates as necessary. Be sure
to check out the Frequently Asked
Questions page, as well. Most of these tips can be found in the
documentation, but we assume most people are like us: you only read
the documentation when you get stuck. The net result is to become
familiar only with necessary features, and to miss out on many handy
shortcuts, so here's our attempt to highlight the handy.
Problems, Nuisances, and Workarounds
It's more honest to guarantee one's software has bugs and glitches
than to guarantee it doesn't. Let us know what you find, and we'll do
our best to be timely in providing workarounds and/or updates here.
- Mac Users
- Slow screen updates: if the programs seem to run
slowly, the video on your machine is probably optimized for a
color depth that does not match that used in the programs.
Setting the color depth to 4-bit (i.e. "16" in the monitors
control panel) should improve things. We plan to make available
versions of the programs that will tune themselves to your
settings, but these programs require substantially more memory
to run on machines using 16 and 32-bit color (i.e. "Thousands"
and "Millions" of colors), and are likely to run slower in
these cases. So far this problem only seems to apply for older
68K machines.
- Windows Users
- Printouts are ugly: Printouts do not fill the screen, do not
have custom comments, etc. Printout are mostly screen dumps, so what you
see on the screen is what you will get on the paper. If you want to create
a more detailed printout, select Edit:Copy Picture from the menu,
paste the image into a layout program (such as Word or PageMaker), dress
it up and print it.
We have been able to do only limited testing on general platforms,
so let us know if you have problems, and we'll try to gather platform
specific wisdom here