I am a little concerned about the proportion of RC feedback relating to
e-mail and internet access as compared to feedback on other productivity
software. I am afraid of HJ releasing this RC version as is based on the
reports that all is well with Eudora, IE5, etc.
What about Word, Excel, Access, etc? You know the applications that so many
of us need to access at work...
In my opinion this release is not near ready yet. Yes it is excelent for
browsing the net and sending e-mail. However, I am finding a few critical
situations in my day-to-day access to mainstreem applications that are
problematic with RC2.which posed no problems with JFW 3.30.26. It would be
unfortunate for HJ to release a version that is in some respects inferior to
its predecessors.
Here are a few situations that I would like to mention. I am interested in
knowing weather they are specific to my system or if they occur on other
systems.
1) In documents or long lists when I press up or down arrow rapidly the
scrolling continues for several seconds after depressing the arrow keys. I
set JFW to "key Repeat" mode so I can quickly scroll through a document
until I get to the approximate location in the document. I have enough
vision to see the blocks of text scrolling on the screen and can tell when I
am near the part of the document that I am interested in. With earlier
versions of JFW this worked nicely. I would just hold down the down arrow
and let the document scroll. When I let go of the down arrow the document
stopped scrolling immediately. Now with 3.22.31, 3.31.31, and 3.31.35 the
document keeps scrolling for several seconds after letting go of the arrow
key. I can replicate this behaviour in at least Word97, Excel97, WordPad,
HJPad, and long list views.
2). When selecting text I get a similar delay in response to actual
selection on the screen as compared to my keystrokes. This problem occurs
to some degree in the above programs but is especially problematic in
Excel97. In Excel, when I am selecting a large range of cells, 5 or more
columns wide, there is a significant delay in the actual selection of cells
on the screen as compared to the actual keystrokes. This makes it extremely
inefficient to select ranges of cells that contain non contiguous data. For
example, I first select along the first row of my desired selection range.
Lets say I select 6 cells along that row by holding down the shift key and
pressing left arrow 5 times. So far so good. However, when I begin
pressing the down arrow to select more rows in my range there is a
significant delay in the screen and speech response.
3). In several dialog boxes in Office 97 programs JFW is not recognizing
some controls. For example in the Find and Replace dialog box if you choose
"More..} to display the extra options and you tab to theFormats or Special
buttons JFW says "MSO Generic Container" instead of the buttons name.
I imagine that the sluggish response in items 1 and 2 are likely due to JFW
attempting to monitor several things as each keystroke is pressed. However,
this sluggishness is sacrificing the basic use of the applications for extra
(welcomed) monitoring of the workspace, i.e. detecting tables etc. I
submitted a bug report with the first beta outlining the sluggishness in the
genral navigation among cels in Excel. Thankfully, HJ rectified that
problem and now navigating cells in Excel is very snappy. I hope that a
similar fix is applied in this case...
BTW system details
ThinkPad 390 with 96 MB RAM
Neomajic Media AV 256 video card
Behaviour occurs in 256, 16bit, and 24bit true color display settings
Color scheme is Windows Standard (not large or extra large)
Behaviour occurs with Eloquence or DecExpress DTE drivers
Sorry for the long post.
Kindest Regards,
Vince.
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