Future Suggestions

T_Brennan · Post by **T_Brennan** » Mon Apr 30, 2001 6:22 pm

ATLANTIS COMMENTS Atlantis is absolutely superb. I am very happy to have registered, and wish you great success. I am impressed by the skilled work that went into writing Atlantis. What a work of art, how pleasant it is to use. Even the sound scheme, which might seem silly until you try it, really adds to the pleasure of writing. I do have feature suggestions, but I never would want Atlantis to become 'bloatware'. I make these suggestions in case they can be included in the sleek, efficient way that Atlantis has been written thus far. But even if you never added another feature, Atlantis is very useful as it is today. Here are features I would like to see added to Atlantis: 'NORMAL' VIEW MODE - While WYSIWYG is very pleasant and useful, it would be very nice to have the option of non-paginated mode. This is less distracting when writing in a continuous flow, not concerned with pages. IMAGE PLACEMENT - It would be nice to be able to mark and drag images to random placements. Likewise, it would be nice to be able to drag blocks of text, and create sidebars. BORDERS - It would be nice to create line borders around images and text blocks, or ranges of selected text. COLUMNS AND TABLES - Newspaper type columns can make for more readable pages, and can make more efficiently packed pages of information, like columns of numbers. Tables are likewise very handy. SPELLCHECKING - A nice option would be to have spellchecking watching while you write, marking questionable words. The text editor in 'The Bat!' email program does this, and I like it. LINE BREAKS - The options to save .txt with or without line breaks would be very useful for compatibilty with other text programs. My only problem so far is with HELP: HTML HELP SYSTEM - I think it would be better if Atlantis HELP did not use the HTML HELP system. When I try to use HELP from within Atlantis, I get error messages, and cannot access HELP. Fortunately, I CAN read the HELP file if I select it from my PROGRAMS menu, but first I must click past about 10 error messages. I don't want to 'upgrade' HTML help in my system. HTML HELP involves Internet Explorer, which I don't like at all, so this is a problem for me. Thank you for making your excellent work available. -Terence Brennan-

Max_Quordlepleen · Post by **Max_Quordlepleen** » Mon Apr 30, 2001 7:15 pm

Hi Terence, nice to hear another Atlantis fan. I'm  with you on borders, columns and tables, if they can be done without bloat. Spell-as-you-go in WP programs seems to be a bit of a resource hog, from my limited experience with Word and WordPerfect. I have found that both those "big" wp app.s work faster with Spell-as-you turned off. I wonder if the reason it seems to work well in The Bat! is that emails tend to be smaller than documents. On the "normal" mode, I was curious to see if I could come up with anything that approximated what you were after, and found that by unchecking "Page Margin Borders" in the View Menu, and then selecting "Magnifying Glass" mode, I was able to get the illusion of "normal mode", without visible page borders, etc. Just a thought.  :D

Van · Post by **Van** » Fri Jun 08, 2001 11:32 pm

I was simply astonished by the almost perfect implementation of the drag and drop of text, the writers dream - almost. The one shortcoming is that when you doubleclick a word to select it, and than attempt to drag it, the whole paragraph gets selected - the result of trying to drag to early... Need an option to uncheck selecting paragraphs by triple clicking!!! Than it will be perfect. Another feature I'd like to see is the possibility to split the window, at least horizontally - making one able to see another part of a longer doc, while writing further on. The shortcut for 'statistics' ctrl+K+W closes the document inadvertently if the K is not properly pressed. Perhaps one can make one's custom short cuts? The typing sound are nifty, BUT, would it be possible to eliminate the THREE chimmings when typing at the end of line? I would like to hear only one chimming sound when wrapping the line, like on a typerwriter! Like another poster here, I would like to see the true Normal view mode, not faked one like somebody here sugested. For generating text, the WYSIWYG transitions between pages (horizontal) are screen space wasting (always want to see the most of text I can) and are distracting. Another thing I would like to see is the ability to preserve day to day state - so that the open documents at shut down re-open automatically next time I start up. When I started using AOM, I was bothered by loosing the page settings when starting a new document, perhaps it might be solved by creating a new custom template for documents and choosing it as a default template for new documents. Well, maybe it can be done, maybe not, the reason I don't know is that I used to use before Atlantis WordTabs by Skip Bremer (freeware), and I still have a tendency to use it as my main word processor. I suggest that you look at that piece of software and perhaps implement some of its good points... Certainly one of its very appreciated features is that a whole bunch of docs stays open in it, even if it was completely shut down. And it has the Normal view mode - the only one that I use anyway. I am not a DTP person... On the other hand, its drag and drop abilities are average, that is, quite bad. Oh well, hope you don't mind my mentioning the concurence. One more thing, when I hide all menus (I love that), it would be nice to keep the document tabs visible for visual control, which docs are open, and to be able to pick/switch docs with a mouse click, not by hot keys...on the other hand, the clasic main menus like File ... could go too, if that is possible, one can do most, if not all from keyboard anyway, and if I need them, I can show all menus. And the tabs could be made to look graphically more like tabs ... I had couple times Atlantis to quit on me on Win98, dont't know haw I did it, but it is not 100% stable, but just OK. Also, I deselected some of the sounds playing, but somehow the settings got lost several times, now it seems to stick. I am going to start using Atlantis again more often, its a question of one's habit I guess, once one settles on a processor, one tends to stick with it, even if it has some shortcomings. My biggest one with Atlantis is the lack of the Normal mode view and that the docs would stay open day to day. Perhaps some of these thigs I write about are already there, if yes, don't guage my eys out. Will report with more ideas for improvement, but that doesn't mean, I don't like Atlantis, quite the contrary... Otherwise, what bothers me on this forum is that it is not enough to enable 'cookies that are stored only for the session' but must enable full blown cookie welcome - I am not a privacy freak, but I've seen things ... the world is so blody brazen nowadays ... going to shut them off as soon as I log off Van

BTW how do you work these nifty icons, can they be inserted into text at appropriate places?

Post by **admin** » Sat Jun 09, 2001 1:57 pm

>Need an option to uncheck selecting paragraphs by triple clicking!!! You could decrease the double-click speed in your Mouse settings (click the Start button of the Windows Taskbar, choose the Settings | Control Panel command, double-click the Mouse icon). Also you should make a delay between the second and third clicks when trying to drag text. >The shortcut for 'statistics' ctrl+K+W closes the document inadvertently The correct hotkey is Ctrl+K,W. This means that you should press the Ctrl+K first, then release these keys, and press the W. >I would like to see the true Normal view mode The Normal view mode is scheduled for future releases. But I can suggest a temporary solution. You could modify the page settings to emulate this Normal mode. Specify 0'' for the Top and Bottom page margins. Also specify 22'' for the Page Width. >Another thing I would like to see is the ability to preserve day to day state - so that the open >documents at shut down re-open automatically next time I start up. It is very probably that this feature will be available in the next minor release of Atlantis Ocean Mind (1.0.1.x). New documents always use the page settings of the corresponding documents templates. When you press the Ctrl+N keys, the page settings of the Normal template (by default) are used. Just modify the page settings of this Normal template if you are not satisfied with them (choose the File | Document Templates..., double-click the Normal icon, modify Page settings, then save this template). >...to be able to pick/switch docs with a mouse click, not by hot keys You could choose the desired document from the Window menu. By the way, I like your acronym AOM. Sounds almost like AOL.

Thanks for suggestions.

Post by **admin** » Sat Jun 09, 2001 2:35 pm

Also this next minor release of Atlantis Ocean Mind (1.0.1.x) will contain new Drag & Drop features. For example, you could drag text, pictures, and links from other applications to the Atlantis documents.

Van · Post by **Van** » Sat Jun 09, 2001 5:46 pm

Thanks for replying, I just implemented your suggestions. I actually had to increase the doubleclick speed, that way I really have to click fast to select the paragraph - I think the speed is derived from the doubleclick ... Here I got an idea. Currently if I press ctrl and click once, the sentence gets selected. How about having this feature with another hotkey for a word selection.

Then if I press, say Alt key, and click any word, it gets selected and with another click I drag it (currently Alt and drag selects a block of text..., perhaps it could be an option to choose between this key doing that, or selecting a word) This could be improved further still, by not requiring more than a single click to be able to drag.... Simply press Alt and click a word and right away drag it to another place, maybe with holding shift to drag a copy of it... How about something like that. The current scheme of drag and drop would be preserved as it is, that would have to be used for draging several words at a time. A single word moving by 'drag and drop' is used perhaps most frequently. Ah, I did not know that one is suposed to use the Ctrl+K,W that way, its new to me. I though that you have some funny notation of the required key-press. Now I get it... I look forward to the Normal view of documents, I did eliminate the margins, made width some 10.5" and height 22" and saved it as Normal template, the one drawback it has that when I have resizable free-floating app window, then the text flows beyond view, have to adjust the ruller settings. I use Atlantis like that - not maximized - to have a view, say of a page on the internet that I write a reaction to. Screen space is then even more at a premium, one doesn't need to loose some more to WYSIWYG view in Atlantis. Given that some people like to eliminate the splash screen at startup, why not make a simple little splash logo, say half inch high by an inch wide, with the word 'Atlantis' and in small letters underneath 'Ocean Mind,' or just the letters AOM I was also thinking, if you wouldn't want to make another icon for the executable. It seems a bit too dark bluish, for the new release, you could make a competition for new icon... just a thought Van

Van · Post by **Van** » Sat Jun 09, 2001 5:58 pm

Speaking of the similarity of AOM and AOL, M is just next letter in alphabet after L, you could gain some publicity gains without having sued the pants off you by AOL... ::) The external drag and drop will be welcome. Am I not mistaken in that it could be perhaps used to get around the inability to copy from IE5 text and pictures (not just picture placeholders) at the same time? Or not? Van

Post by **admin** » Sat Jun 09, 2001 7:23 pm

Regrettably this will not solve the problem. But you could drag each image separately from IE. In this case it would succeed.

Grail_King · Post by **Grail_King** » Mon Jun 11, 2001 12:52 pm

I like to see word wrap around images and an easier way of image placement, I also would like to use Agent as my mailer with Atlantis. GK

Post by **admin** » Mon Jun 11, 2001 3:11 pm

About mail clients. I think you might be interested in reading another thread of this Forum. Please click here.

Van · Post by **Van** » Tue Jun 12, 2001 5:57 pm

What I mean is this: I was asking the other day about switching off not just the formating menus etc, but the main menu as well - so that there would be no menu whatsoever, just the window. Today, I noticed that if I de-maximize the sub window of Atlantis not the whole app, it floats free, just the plain minimalistic window with no menus. Now, wouldn't it be great, if it were possible to have this window to have property just like a stand alone program... then it could be made either maximized to cover the whole screen by itself(thus maximally utilizing the screenspace - there is never enough of it) or it could be reduced to share the screen space with another app., the IE or whatever, thus giving one view on what one may be writing about... This menuless window would have to be operated completely by hotkey commands, if menus were needed, one would use some hot key combo to back-associate the window to the parent app. - the Atlantis...which could sit in the taskbar tray, only providing the inteligence for the execution of the hotkey commands and mouse clicks and drags in the individual windows When deassociated (divorced) form the parent app., the individual windows would show on the Win taskbar, like any program and could be switched among as one switches between apps., Alt+tab The whole idea is that one uses menus only very seldom when writing, so why have them at all. The gain in terms of space is only about a 1/4" at the top of the screen if one already switched off the other menus, but my, how smart it would look

Van

Max_Quordlepleen · Post by **Max_Quordlepleen** » Tue Jun 12, 2001 6:48 pm

Van wrote: Today, I noticed that if I de-maximize the sub window of Atlantis not the whole app, it floats free, just the plain minimalistic window with no menus. Now, wouldn't it be great, if it were possible to have this window to have property just like a stand alone program... then it could be made either maximized to cover the whole screen by itself(thus maximally utilizing the screenspace - there is never enough of it) or it could be reduced to share the screen space with another app., the IE or whatever, thus giving one view on what one may be writing about... Van

YES!!! Thanks for discovering this, Van, that is way cool, and I endorse your suggestion whole heartedly. I already use hotkeys more than the mouse, so a menu-less window would not be a problem, especially if one could assign custom hotkey combinations. ;)

Van · Post by **Van** » Thu Jun 14, 2001 11:45 pm

As I may already have mentioned, I often write commentaries on various articles and I need to see the text I comment on (preferably several paragraphs of it) while also seeing decent section of what I am writing. Today I opened one document and then I clicked on the Atlantis shortcut once more and it started another instance of Atlantis. So far so good. Then I opened that same document I already had opened, and I was warned that the Doc... is used by other program and do I want to open a copy of it. I OKeyed that and voila, split view achieved.

I tiled (by hand) the two instances of Atlantis on my screen, positioned the text to my heart content and started commenting... :) When done, I just closed the extra doc view and it did not even save itself as a 'Doc copy.rtf', so my files do not get cluttered with copies of copies... Hope this might help or give idea to somebody Van

Post by **admin** » Fri Jun 15, 2001 3:21 am

Oh, these humans... They never stop inventing... ;)

Van · Post by **Van** » Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:19 am

Yep, it is never done, ever

And, what would you expect, but they try things ...and everything too

In that spirit, I tested if drag'n drop might already work between at least Atlantis and Atlantis. I know it is not implemented yet, but between brothers (Atlantis and Atlantis of the same persuasion) ... who knows... it just might work. Well, I regret to say, there is no such level of understanding, they don't talk to each other on that level, too hauty for them, need an outside mediator called system clipboard - its a kind of diplomatic like behavior between them. But the reason I write this is to give advanced notice to the wizards who will try implement the drag'n drop between any app and Atlantis. As I had the two instances of Atlantis tiled one above the other, I noticed that dragging a selection down across the bottom border of Atlantis wildly scrolled the text down in that app. before I could leave its window with my load of usefull information... :( Now that is something to try to prevent from happening... will take some smart brains to be sure :P but of that there seems to be aplenty in the development team

Van

Van · Post by **Van** » Sat Jun 16, 2001 1:20 am

Hyphens ... I would like to see them in future releases, and soft hyphens too, that show only when a word comes to the end of line and breakes into two parts. Columns of text are not a bad idea either... But let's not get too hungry for features

In 'find and replace' text, I don't like that when I press the 'Replace' button, the next instance is being looked up right away...I'd rather press the button Find Next to go to next find. I cannot visually check the change, it happens so fast, and if the next instance is way further down the text, I can't even check exactly what happened. ??? I do some complicated and extensive find and replace once in a while and I like to do first few changes by 'hand', checking what's happening and only then I dare press the 'change all' button, since it is such a powerfull feature... Yesterday I did 500 to 1000 replacements in one press of the button. One doesn't want to goof up. And I did dome 20 operations like that on the single document. You get a job like that when you have to deal with cross computer platform, cross language, cross keyboard layout that results in screwed up special characters, the diacritical markups on letters ... :-X And speaking of languages, I do fairly often deal with Czech language (been once born there), and its alphabet coding is not right in Atlantis. Some characters show up as rectangles ... mainly the letter 'z'. It shows most when pasting in text. I don't want to use the localized version of Atlantis, I was thinking if there is a way to tweak some setting... Many wordprocessors on PC handle Czech language perfectly, yet have no connection whatsoever to that country, at least as far as I can determine. It seems to be a problem of keyboard mapping. Van Just a short suggestion Van

Post by **admin** » Sat Jun 16, 2001 5:39 am

About the Czech language. Any language version of Atlantis can be used for working on documents in any Western, Central, and Eastern European language (including the Czech, of course). As a matter of fact, we have thousands of users from the Czech and Slovakia. For typing Czech texts in Atlantis, you should just activate the Czech keyboard layout. Also check whether the current font can be used with the Czech language (it should contain glyphs for Czech characters). As a rule, the standard Windows fonts (Arial, Times New Roman) include characters for any European language. When you type text, Atlantis marks this text as belonging to the language of the active keyboard layout so that the appropriate spellchecker would be used for this text (by the way, you could download the Czech spellchecker for Atlantis Ocean Mind from the Add-on Spellcheckers page). The same about pasting plain text to Atlantis. If the clipboard does not contain indication to which language the clipboard text belongs, Atlantis considers this text as belonging to the language of the current keyboard layout. So when the Czech keyboard layout is active, any Czech plain text would be pasted properly. Atlantis also has another interesting feature – Change Font Character Set (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F3). You can instruct Atlantis to display the selected text using glyphs from the desired language.

Van · Post by **Van** » Sat Jun 16, 2001 10:59 pm

First, thanks for the direction to the Czech spellchecker - one interesting thing... The Czech version has the most words, almost three million words, only Finnish checker comes close in under two million word, the others only in hundreds of thousands words...

Where did you dig this up "Change Font Character Set (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F3)" I know this combo is listed in Hotkeys help, but is it someplace in menus in the Atlantis?? I doubt it. That's amazing...(scratching my head) Also will have to figure its exact meaning in practice, these abstract terms have my head spinnig (font 'Set'... ???) It sounds simple how you describe it, I have some limited knowledge of these things, generally I have no problem typing in text in Czech characters. The problems crop up when I copy text off some web site and paste into wordprocessing program. I noticed that Atlantis shows most characters right, but some are not, and selecting text and making changes in menus related to languages makes no difference... Its like those language Encodings (Baltic, Western Europen...) in IExplorer, they NEVER do ANYTHING that I would notice on a web page. Go figure what its for... And simillarly in Atlantis, the font chosen does have the characters, I can write them, but off the web, some letters come as oblong boxes, or some such replacements.... most trouble is with the letter z. That's perhaps because of the historically created mess in QWERTY layout as far as Czech language is concerned, which has QWERTZ. And that's only the begining.

Before Atlantis, I used almost exclusivelly WordTabs wordprocessor and it never had any troubles interpreting pasted text, no matter what... amazing isn't it. I'll exlore the issue some more and come back with more definite complaints, or acolades. Van

Post by **admin** » Sun Jun 17, 2001 5:02 am

>The Czech version has the most words, almost three million words Right. The Czech spellchecker is one of our best spellcheckers. About the Change Font Character Set operation. As you might now, the extended characters (the characters with codes greater than 127) might have different images (glyphs) in different character sets (in different languages). For example, the character with decimal code 200 looks absolutely differently in the following character sets:

You could conduct the following experiment: insert the È (code 200) character to the Atlantis document (you could use the Insert | Symbol... command). Then select this character, and perform the Format | Special | Change Font Character Set... command (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F3). Choose any Central European language (Czech, Slovak, Polish etc). Then perform this command again but choose any Eastern European language (Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian etc). So probably now you understand this command better. This command does not change the text itself (characters, character codes) but it instructs Atlantis to display the selected text according to the desired language. Now about the problem "MS Internet Explorer -> Atlantis". First, Atlantis does everything properly. I will try to explain. Let's suppose that the default language of your Windows is the English. You are reading a page with Czech texts in your MS Internet Explorer. Now you wish to transfer some fragment of this text from IE to Atlantis. So you select the desired text, and copy it to the clipboard. Now the most important thing. MS IE places information to the clipboard in multiple formats: Plain Text, RTF text (formatted text), and HTML. About the Plain Text format. MS IE knows that the default language of your Windows is English. So when placing the Czech plain text onto the clipboard, MS IE replaces all the extended Czech characters with the closest characters from the main Latin alphabet. For example, the

is replaced with Z (hard to explain why MS IE does this). So when pasting Czech text from IE to Atlantis as plain text, you might lose some information.

Van · Post by **Van** » Tue Jun 19, 2001 12:57 pm

... appear not to be quite there on Atlantis :( What you explain here is OK as far as it goes ... BUT - If I either 'cut and paste' or 'drag and drop' text of any major Czech newspaper from MSIE into WordTabs (my processor of choice before Atlantis), it is simply the way it should be, no complaints there. If I do the same with Atlantis, things are not so good. Adjusting Font, Current Language Coding, Font Character Set, ... helps some, but not completely. Some letters still do not display the proper diacritical markups - so characteristic for that language. I am really puzzled by what's going on. Both apps are set to the same font (Arial, Times New Roman is also OK for Czech characters ?glyphs?), I know I have to select text to have any changes applied to it (at least that cannot hurt anything), I change the Language Coding via panel accessible form Status bar (that doesn't seem to have much any effect), I change the Font Character Set (it works in a limited way - converts correctly some characters, but not all by far, besides it has funny way of always showing setting of "EnglishUS" even if the selected text already had been 'changed' via this pannel just previously...). Changing Keyboard language layout is only pertinent to what gets typed, it works perfectly ... if I was willing to retype the deficient characters of the pasted text in Atlantis

, then things would be OK from there on... I must also mention, that WordTabs has no possibility at all (as far as I can determine) to change such arcane stuff as the "Current Language Coding," or "Font Character Set," only the "Font" and the "Keyboard language layout" (but this last one is Microsoft's feature of Windows and only affects what is typed in) can be changed, and only the Font (Arial, Times New Roman) needs be selected right for Czech pasted text to be correctly displayed. It simply somehow ??? works in WordTabs. Why things do not quite work out in Atlantis is beyond me, I do not completely understand mechanics of these things so I do not want to criticize, after all, I may be in some way dense and be at fault myself... ::) Atlantis has othervise many pluses over WT, and switching between them is not really a solution, one tends to settle with one app usually, for goood or evil

Where could that proverbial dog be burried? ??? Van

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