Lotus, WordPerfect Work Together on PM Interface
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
LAS VEGAS (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- Lotus has been
working with WordPerfect Corp. to develop a common user interface
for their respective Presentation Manager products, the companies
revealed at Comdex. The "technology partnership" was formed, the
companies said, to enhance PM with features needed to help
current users of character-based applications migrate easily to
graphical software.
 
With estimated 70 percent market shares in their respective
market categories, both companies' products have huge installed
bases of customers used to a keyboard-oriented interface. The
upcoming 1-2-3/G preserves the "slash" commands of its
character-based ancestors, and WordPerfect 5.1 for OS/2-PM will
still support the traditional function keys. But at the same
time, the PM versions will introduce CUA-compliant mouse-and-menu
interfaces with pull-down menus.
 
The major enhancements the two software companies say they've
added to PM are cascading menus (which stay on the screen as you
descend the menu tree) and so-called "structured dialog boxes"
that contain multiple selection items. Without these additions,
users would have had to learn new command sequences because
normal pull-down menus don't allow as many decision layers as the
more old-fashioned Lotus tree, they say. With the PM extensions,
which IBM has endorsed and says it will incorporate into the CUA,
people can use familiar keyboard sequences and run existing
macros without translation.
 
Lotus and WordPerfect also added a capability they dubbed
WYSBYGI, or "wiz-biggie," for "What You See Before You Get It."
With WYSBYGI, fonts, colors, and borders are previewed in windows
so that you can, for example, choose a typeface based on what it
looks like rather than from a menu of names. The two firms also
said they worked to optimize hot links between their
applications, including the ability to import data with
formatting attributes intact.
 
                              --- Andy Reinhardt
 
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