Double-Trinity

http://www.softmaker.com

I recently downloaded the demo version of the Text Maker application, then turned on clear type, and went through all the menus, looking at the powerful very customizable pocket PC app which blew away literally any other I'd ever seen... save one huge problem:

the screen redraw rate on the Axim 400 was very slow, about 50 words per minute... the trouble Is I can type about twice that, making this text editro nearly impossible to use... also, the thought that a word processor on the axim with the specs it has not being able to handle a simple screen redraw after entering text of any kind is completley ludicrous... I don't know why in the world this was given such high reviews from so many reputable sources... it has all kinds of word-processor features in it, all compacted nicely into a few-megabyte package, yet lacks the ability to type simple text. A program with an entire section devoted to precise hotkeying is useless as input with the keyboard is painfully slow.

If anyone else knows of a better-quality pocket PC text editor, than the included Pocket Word, other than Text Maker, it woul dbe a great help. I am seeking sometihng like this, but unfortunately Text-Maker does not deliver :(

EDIT: damnit... when will I learn the difference between the "software" and "applications" forum. <looks through dozens and dozens of "moved" posts>

at least I'm not alone -_-

SoftMaker

Quote:

Originally posted by Double-Trinity http://www.softmaker.com I recently downloaded the demo version of the Text Maker application, then turned on clear type, and went through all the menus, looking at the powerful very customizable pocket PC app which blew away literally any other I'd ever seen... save one huge problem: the screen redraw rate on the Axim 400 was very slow, about 50 words per minute... the trouble Is I can type about twice that, making this text editro nearly impossible to use... also, the thought that a word processor on the axim with the specs it has not being able to handle a simple screen redraw after entering text of any kind is completley ludicrous... I don't know why in the world this was given such high reviews from so many reputable sources... it has all kinds of word-processor features in it, all compacted nicely into a few-megabyte package, yet lacks the ability to type simple text. A program with an entire section devoted to precise hotkeying is useless as input with the keyboard is painfully slow. If anyone else knows of a better-quality pocket PC text editor, than the included Pocket Word, other than Text Maker, it woul dbe a great help. I am seeking sometihng like this, but unfortunately Text-Maker does not deliver :( EDIT: damnit... when will I learn the difference between the "software" and "applications" forum. <looks through dozens and dozens of "moved" posts> at least I'm not alone -_-

Turn off ClearType. ClearType is an enormous speed killer on many machines, and for TextMaker, it might make the difference for you.

This said, we had (I think) one other report about slowness of TextMaker specifically on the Axim. Now if Dell Germany would FINALLY ship us the Axim we ordered four weeks ago, we could try that out and, if we can reproduce it, fix it.

Have other Axim users encountered the same problem (with ClearType off)?

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

P.S.: You are using the LATEST trial, aren't you? (tmpw02ev.exe). Screen redraw is twice as fast compared to the previous release.

jda5id

Martin -

I haven't tried your software but I just wanted to commend your firm for having someone that is monitoring sites like this and proactively dealing with customer concerns and feedback. Far too many companies ignore this type of input (perhaps due to the sheer volume of it in some cases) and I think it is fantastic to see someone taking advantage of being able to get close to their customers and users.

Double-Trinity

Quote:

Turn off ClearType. ClearType is an enormous speed killer on many machines, and for TextMaker, it might make the difference for you.

I use cleartype univerally, and turning that off is not an option for me, it is so much more readable that it is a very very important feature to me. I tried it with it off, and it still had the problem as well. But claertype hasn't made any speed differences for me in any other program, and the processor speed should be enough that it shouldn't make any difference one way or another,

Quote:

This said, we had (I think) one other report about slowness of TextMaker specifically on the Axim. Now if Dell Germany would FINALLY ship us the Axim we ordered four weeks ago, we could try that out and, if we can reproduce it, fix it.

Well, I hope you can get to that, Text Maker is a powerful application, but for me to buy it, I won't be willing to sacrifice Clear Type, but since that has made no noticible difference anywa, I don't think that is the problem. Again, 400MHz should be more than enough to compensate for that, and to run a non-bloated word processor, so there must be some other problem, perhaps a driver conflict or something.

Quote:

P.S.: You are using the LATEST trial, aren't you? (tmpw02ev.exe). Screen redraw is twice as fast compared to the previous release.

I tried both actaully, the trial before then I updated, and if anything, the redraw has gotten slower.

EDIT:

the more that I think about it, the more I think that it is the screen driver, I used the FITALY demo with a bunch of macros to inout huge volumes of text really really fast... and it went totally flawlessly, it could be that it pasted the text in chunks, and it screwed up line breaks, but I think it might actually be the Dell Foldable Keyobard Driver + Sometihng about Text Maker causing the problem, because I noteiced similar problems in pocket word only when using the keynoard, in addition to actively playing a song through my headphones with Pocket Music, but not GS Player or any other MP3 player.

Very weird stuff.

Quote:

I haven't tried your software but I just wanted to commend your firm for having someone that is monitoring sites like this and proactively dealing with customer concerns and feedback. Far too many companies ignore this type of input (perhaps due to the sheer volume of it in some cases) and I think it is fantastic to see someone taking advantage of being able to get close to their customers and users.

Yes, I was pleasantly surprised to see you actually reply here, but that is good, it insures you are doing all you can to actively support and improve the product, a very important step which is often hard to tell in some companies.

SoftMaker

Our new Axim arrived, together with the foldable keyboard, two days ago (finally...), and we have spent the time since trying to track down the reported problem.

What we found out is that if you type quickly on the foldable keyboard, text appears only with a noticeable delay on screen. This does not happen with the on-screen keyboard.

After trying to find out what's going on for two days, let me say this in the politest possible way: The authors of the Dell keyboard driver should be taken out to the woods and shot. They don't seem to know how the Windows message queue works.

If you press a key on the foldable keyboard, it is not necessarily sent to the Windows message queue. If the keyboard driver finds pending messages, it buffers the keystroke and sends it over only when the message queue is empty. Problem is that (a) apps are bombarded with messages all the time, and (b) TextMaker sends itself WM_IDLE messages when it has nothing better to do. This kicks off background formatting of the document, on-the-fly spell-checking, autosave etc. - just like a well-designed application should do that.

So, TextMaker thinks the system is idle and does all kinds of stuff, and the keyboard driver then thinks "oh, the system must be busy, I better not send keystrokes".

We have developed a fix for this which will be incorporated into our public code soon. We need to test a bit more to see that it doesn't cause side-effects on other machines, so check for an announcement in our newsletter.

Just one last word: Aaargh.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Double-Trinity

Quote:

Originally posted by SoftMaker Our new Axim arrived, together with the foldable keyboard, two days ago (finally...), and we have spent the time since trying to track down the reported problem. What we found out is that if you type quickly on the foldable keyboard, text appears only with a noticeable delay on screen. This does not happen with the on-screen keyboard. After trying to find out what's going on for two days, let me say this in the politest possible way: The authors of the Dell keyboard driver should be taken out to the woods and shot. They don't seem to know how the Windows message queue works. If you press a key on the foldable keyboard, it is not necessarily sent to the Windows message queue. If the keyboard driver finds pending messages, it buffers the keystroke and sends it over only when the message queue is empty. Problem is that (a) apps are bombarded with messages all the time, and (b) TextMaker sends itself WM_IDLE messages when it has nothing better to do. This kicks off background formatting of the document, on-the-fly spell-checking, autosave etc. - just like a well-designed application should do that. So, TextMaker thinks the system is idle and does all kinds of stuff, and the keyboard driver then thinks "oh, the system must be busy, I better not send keystrokes". We have developed a fix for this which will be incorporated into our public code soon. We need to test a bit more to see that it doesn't cause side-effects on other machines, so check for an announcement in our newsletter. Just one last word: Aaargh. Martin Kotulla SoftMaker Software GmbH

A few things:

1) sorry for the multiple topcis, I'd made that one in the wrong forum a while back, and since it was in the wrong forum, and had afallen back several pages, I made the new one.

Thanks for the explanation, now I understand the problem... that is quite strange why Dell would make such shoddy drivers for this, their othe peripherals seem fine, I do know however that those keyboars are separately sub-contracted, so I wonder if there are any other drivres for it that would techincally work, maybe with some modifications? I'm not suggesting anyone actually attempt that, but it would be a good idea.

I will definitely look into Text Maker further once a fix comes out for this, I was also however disappointed to find out that my second-fastest input method, the FITALKY soft keyboard, also has a very erratic and poorly desigend driver for it, making it not work for Text Maker either (at least not the macros)

You can undesrtand my frustrations when you see my comparative typing/scratching/pecking etc. speeds:

Soft input, transcriber -- who even knows, too erratic to be usible
Soft Input, sliding method -- a 3rd party plugin, never finished learning it, fairly slow on it though a little faster than transcriber
Soft input, qwerty -- 18 wpm
soft input, letter recognition -- 25 wpm
soft input, Fitaly -- 40 WPM, growing fast, with practice should soon my 50 WMP, somehwat stressful over long durations
Typing, qwerty -- ~100 wpm, stamina is nearly infinite
Typing, dvorak -- negligible, though I do well on the number row :D

I will however keep an eye on the Softmaker website, all your products look great, and the new spreadsheet and DB apps should be quite slick also. I also find it awesome that you've made a word-processor, even for desktop, that has a tiny footprint, uses very little system resources, yet has all the featurs that are actually necessary for making documents.

wmm

Quote:

Originally posted by SoftMaker After trying to find out what's going on for two days, let me say this in the politest possible way: The authors of the Dell keyboard driver should be taken out to the woods and shot. They don't seem to know how the Windows message queue works.

This would not be too surprising, as the keyboard was originally manufactured for PalmOS units, and then Dell contracted with them for the Axim. I think it's quite possible that someone there took a crash course in how to write a PocketPC driver and didn't quite master all the niceties.

Have you communicated this to Darfon, the manufacturer, or to Dell? I'm sure they'd like to fix it if they are informed that it's broken. (And maybe version 1.1 of the driver will have the functionality from the PalmOS driver that's missing from the PocketPC driver, notably the ability to switch the right shift and up-arrow keys.)

Double-Trinity

Quote:

Originally posted by wmm This would not be too surprising, as the keyboard was originally manufactured for PalmOS units, and then Dell contracted with them for the Axim. I think it's quite possible that someone there took a crash course in how to write a PocketPC driver and didn't quite master all the niceties. Have you communicated this to Darfon, the manufacturer, or to Dell? I'm sure they'd like to fix it if they are informed that it's broken. (And maybe version 1.1 of the driver will have the functionality from the PalmOS driver that's missing from the PocketPC driver, notably the ability to switch the right shift and up-arrow keys.)

Just curious, does the manufacturer of the keyboard have a webiste of their own? I'm curious in seeing wha tother PDAs they make these for etc.

wmm

Quote:

Originally posted by Double-Trinity Just curious, does the manufacturer of the keyboard have a webiste of their own? I'm curious in seeing wha tother PDAs they make these for etc.

Well, they did: http://www.darfon.com.tw. It seems to be offline at the moment, although I was just there a few days ago.

SoftMaker

We have been able to work around the problems in the Dell keyboard driver. There is a new service pack for TextMaker and a new trial version, too.

See www.softmaker.com

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Double-Trinity

Ok, I'm trying it out! So far, now that it has been fixed, I am very pleased with this application, I will probabyl end up buying it within the next week or so. The fact that you guys are so active, and responsive when it comes to things like this is another great sign.

NMkiD

SoftMaker, your app is pretty awesome, right now I think I am using version 368 is that the newest version?

Thx

Oh yeah and whens your PocketExcel Killer coming out?? :D
heh got any plans for a PocketFrontPage???? :love:

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SoftMaker

Quote:

Originally posted by NMkiD SoftMaker, your app is pretty awesome, right now I think I am using version 368 is that the newest version? Thx Oh yeah and whens your PocketExcel Killer coming out?? :D heh got any plans for a PocketFrontPage???? :love:

The latest one is build 379, so you're quite a bit behind...

PlanMaker is coming along nicely. We are waiting for the Excel-compatible charting module and the AutoShapes to get finished, and then we'll put all the building blocks together.

An HTML editor might be on the horizon (we are currently working on one for Windows), but this would still be many months away.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Double-Trinity

Quote:

Originally posted by SoftMaker The latest one is build 379, so you're quite a bit behind... PlanMaker is coming along nicely. We are waiting for the Excel-compatible charting module and the AutoShapes to get finished, and then we'll put all the building blocks together. An HTML editor might be on the horizon (we are currently working on one for Windows), but this would still be many months away. Martin Kotulla SoftMaker Software GmbH

Sounds like it's all some pretty cool stuff... and HTML editor would be pretty nice actually, for PPC, perhaps even a general purpose code editor, and maybe a decent browser to test it in ;)

hehehe, just dreams, but what you have done so far has been really great. I'm almost positive I'm going to buy textmaker at thsi point.

Farvignoogen

After reading this thread I am very excited about trying out TextMaker with my Axim. My only question is (I am a newbie) do I get the one for the handheld PC or for the Pocket PC? On the website it said that both operate on WindowsCE. Please let me know. Peace.