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16
RELEASE 0.5
SMARTNOTES (Remember to put title in boldface.)
SmartNotes, from Personics of Concord, MA, (remember company reference) is a
more general approach to the problem that Turner Hall's Note-It solves for
Lotus spreadsheets in particular -- with the broader market and the lesser
functionality that particularity implies. A stroke of marketing genius,
they are (it is?) the electronic equivalent of 3M's Post-It (does this need
a TM sign?) notes; they stick to anything -- directory listings, spreadsheet
cells, calendar dates, names in a text file, what have you. SmartNotes was
developed by two professors, one at Carnegie-Mellon and one at Princeton,
who were having trouble communicating electronically as they attempted to
write and edit joint papers on algorithm development. Typing notes into the
text was intrusive. (...as shown here)
(How do they work?) SmartNotes is an excellent example of the interstitial
programming mentioned on page 9, (make sure page reference is correct) as
are most' terminate-and-stay-resident packages. Each note is attached not to
a "physical" place in a file but rather to a character string or (treatment
of cells and formulas?) a spreadsheet cell address. In text mode, the Note
follows the string wherever it moves in the file. WheneVer.the string shows
up on the screen (and the notes are turned "on"), the SmartNote pops up.. In
spreadsheet mode, SmartNotes can still read only what's on the screen, so it
won't notice formulas, but it can read column and row headings to determine
which cells are on display. (What about spreadsheet restructuring?) It
attaches to a particular cell, and adjusts whenever rows or columns are
added or deleted, as does Note-It.
The biggest problem: What happens if a string used as an anchor is edited
or recalculated? (Remember to note price, memory requirements.) The
$79.95, 90K program will warn the user that he's about to lose his anchor.
Another feature -- or a bug -- is that the Note will appear in reference to,
say, "Alice Haynes," "1986 revenues," or "$149.95" every time that string
appears on your screen. The precise string referred to is under the control
of the user.
Just imagine having a pink box pop up, pointing to a file called "co.let" in
your directory, explaining that this is the source file for a mail-merge of
letters addressed to the names in "co.names." (We could have used that a
couple of months ago.) On an agenda you send to your secretary, (copies?)
who must have her own copy of the program, May 17 could be marked: "Change
this flight to Tuesday. Move up reservations at Rickeys." Or one you send
to a colleague: "Do you think this is in poor taste?" with the response,
"Yes -- but he deserves it." (Is this too many cute examples?) As people
start using e-mail, SmartNotes should come into their own -- and they don't
fall off as easily as those paper ones. (Put a snappy close here.)
SMART MAPS
For most people, working with maps has been akin to drawing graphs with a
"draw" package: Figure out your data, then draw the graph and extend the
lines or bars to the right length. No one does that anymore, of course.
But they still download map outlines from libraries of shapes, and color or
shade the areas within the maps one by one to illustrate their data.
Release 1.0 21 April 1986