OS/2 e-Zine! - Review: Ami Pro v3.0b

Ami Pro 3.0 for OS/2

- by Chris Wenham

Lotus Development Corporation has probably done more than anyone to make OS/2 a serious contender for the desktop by releasing a native office suite for it. The centerpiece of any office suite is usually the word processor; it's the place where we put down our ideas, shape them, and add some pretty clip-art for the 90's techno-hippies who won't look at a piece of paper with any less than 16 different colors on it.

Ami Pro is Lotus' offering in this category. It's an aging product in need of update, but this is promised with Word Pro for OS/2 (the name change made, I guess, to get through to those who think a word processor needs to have 'Word' in its title somewhere).

Installation

Ami Pro's install program reflects what one would see in any other piece of modern software; a high degree of flexibility. With laptops becoming popular and a vast range of people with either tiny hard drives or gargantuan gigabyte machines, it's important to have an install program that gives you the option of installing a little or a lot. It's also important for the install to become a permanent utility, able to selectively install options that were ignored the first time through.

When installing, Ami Pro gives you four options: Complete, Laptop, Custom, and Options-Only. It also has features for installing on a server. Since I have a nice large hard drive in no need of Jenny Craig yet, I chose Complete.

Quite pleasantly, the install completed flawlessly. I was very impressed with it.

"The Look"

With unbelievably bad taste the first thing I judged Ami Pro on after starting it up was how good it looked (gif 13.4k). Not surprisingly, it looks very much like the Windows version--SmartIcon bar at the top, status and control bar at the bottom--pretty much a straight port. Gleefully I also noticed that the vast majority of screen real-estate was given over to the document part, a far cry from some word processors, in which a good third is taken up with buttons all over the place.

Usability

A word processor isn't much good if it's a pain to use, no matter how many features are tacked on. The placement of controls and the use of shortcuts are, in my opinion, what gives a word processor strength. Since creativity is helped by getting thoughts written down quickly, I don't relish going through a myriad of dialog boxes and menus because by then the inspiration will have gone. It's also helpful to have controls and shortcuts easily accessible for doing repetitive tasks.

At the bottom of Ami Pro's screen is a status/control bar with many timesaving features. The first three spaces describe the formatting style, font and font size being used. Clicking them pops up a list of available changes, such as from Body Text to a Bulleted List, or from Times Roman to Helvetica. Very handy.

The SmartIcons too are a boon, especially because there are several different sets, each dedicated to a specific task. The default set gives you all you need for basic editing and formatting tasks, and there are sets for graphics, tables, long documents, 'macro goodies', 'working together', proofing and more.

Frame Based

When discussing the usability of Ami Pro one must certainly mention its frame-based (gif 6k) layout scheme. Inserting graphics, tables or blocks of text is dead easy--so easy it has created scores of Ami Pro loyalists who love it for this one reason. Frames can be moved anywhere and text will be automatically flowed around them (unless you tell it not to), plus they can be customized with a right-click. Frames can be made sticky to appear on every page (for example, a logo), made transparent, given shadows, layered on top of each other, have their corners rounded, etc. Without a doubt It is the coolest part of Ami Pro.

Features

Ami Pro comes with the standard fare of editing helpers--Spell Check, Thesaurus, and Grammar Checker. Each is well implemented and has an extensive stock of words, synonyms and rules respectively. Tables are very good in Ami Pro (something you'd expect from a company that cut its teeth on spreadsheets) with a whole SmartIcon set dedicated to the task.

Graphics are a disappointment. I was expecting to see the great graphics and charting tools that were in the Windows version, but alas they do not appear in the OS/2 version. The Equation Editor is still there though, and there are some limited image processing tools, although they work only with greyscale TIFF files. Ami Pro is still capable of importing many bitmap formats as well as several vector graphics formats. It includes a library of stock color clip art too.

For editing a document you have three different choices: Layout, which is true WYSIWYG editing; Outline, where paragraphs and titles are arranged in a hierarchical order and can be promoted, demoted, moved up and down as you please; and Draft, where pictures and page formatting are temporarily discarded so you can get down to the job of composing and editing.

Several more features are littered through the program, including something called Power Fields which can embed dynamically changing data into the document, used for creating things like indexes and tables of contents. The features of Ami Pro are good, even with some of the best ones from its Windows counterpart missing.

Configurability

With Ami Pro you can flip through several different sets of SmartIcons, either cycling through them in series or by jumping to one by name. Not only can you create and customize your SmartIcon sets but you can also draw your own icons with the built in editor (for assigning to your own macros). Thoughtfully, Lotus also included two sizes of icons, one for regular VGA monitors up to 800x600 resolution, and a larger set for 1024x768 resolutions and higher (or for those who just don't like tiny icons). Customizing a SmartIcon set is a click-and-drag operation, possible not only in the SmartIcons editor (gif 11.7k) but on the actual palette itself for last-second finicky changes.

As for the rest of the program, configurability is 'comfortable' although not outstanding. Ami Pro can run a macro of your choosing at startup and shutdown, giving you the power to really customize if you wish (such as having it open the last file edited when first started). This power probably won't excite most casual users who don't want to learn another macro language.

Performance

The OS/2 version of Ami Pro has been criticized heavily for poor performance, but I was wary of joining in on that spree. To be sure, I gave Ami Pro a good workout to see what it could do under stress.

The review system used was an AMD 486 DX2/80, 8 megabytes of RAM, SuperVGA at 800x600x64k colors, and FileBar as a replacement shell (therefore no overhead from the Workplace Shell loaded).

First I loaded in a large document, the Project Gutenburg edition of Alice in Wonderland. It formatted to about 86 pages in Ami Pro. The time between selecting the document for loading and being able to get down to editing was something like 3 or 4 seconds; although the first pages were editable, the rest were still being formatted and the scroll-bar was readjusting for a few minutes. I started up at the top and scrolled my way through the pages until I reached the last page. This took 1 minute 42 seconds--just over a second per page in Layout mode. In Draft mode it was 1 minute 26 seconds to scroll all the way through.

I noticed a definite delay when jumping from Layout mode to Outline mode on the first pass. I waited for about four or five minutes for the process to get done (not much swapping, just processor drain).

Another bottleneck proved to be printing, which took an unusual amount of swapping. There is an option in Tools->User-Setup for changing printing to either a background or a foreground job. Setting it to print in the foreground made printing much faster. Other than printing, screen-updates weren't that snappy and occasionally Ami Pro would talk to the swap file for half a minute and refuse to respond to any of my commands.

In short, I've given Ami Pro's performance a good run-through, even to the point of loading up Roget's Thesaurus (Project Gutenberg edition again) which formatted to about 620 pages. Scrolling through this document was still fast and only prompted a little 'clicking' to the hard disk. I consider Ami Pro to be usable and quite tolerable on this 8 meg machine. Nonetheless, performance isn't stellar.

On-line Help

Ami Pro's help files and tutorials are very comprehensive. There's a 'How do I?' section to help you with common tasks that have less than obvious solutions, a tutorial that guides you through the basics, and detailed help for each menu and command. There aren't any 'Wizards' or other automated systems for creating common documents though, other than following the Help file's instructions.

Conclusions

Ami Pro works well on a limited machine like mine. I expected it to perform a lot more slowly based on what I've heard from others, but I could not confirm this. I'd like to see more use of OS/2's power in it though; with two documents loaded WatchCat reported that it was only using 2 threads, while DeScribe, for example, uses 3 before any documents are even loaded.

Nonetheless, I can't wait to see Ami Pro's successor, Word Pro, when it comes out in early '96. Lotus is offering it for a, "$19.95 shipping and handling charge," to those who buy Lotus Ami Pro between April 24,1995 and the ship date of Word Pro.

editor's note: Lotus offers Ami Pro v3.1 with the latest version of SmartSuite for OS/2. While no editorial copy was available at the time of this writing, they claim this version is, "designed from the ground up for the graphical 32-bit OS/2 2.0 environment," whereas v3.0 seems to be a port of 16-bit code.

Lotus Ami Pro for OS/2 v3.0b
Lotus Development Corporation
SRP: US$ 439 (SmartSuite v2.0 incl. Ami Pro v3.0b--upgrade pricing available)

Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company--Wenham's Web Works. He has been writing all sorts of strange things from comedy to sci-fi to this.

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