★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ COMPANION|8000 Plus) ★ |
| Companion | Applications Bureautique |
If you're a normal, healthy, well-balanced PCW user, you will have discovered that by the end of a day's tapping at the keyboard your desk has mysteriously become covered with an undergrowth of slips of paper reading 'don't forget to put the cat out' and '30 miles x 25p per mile = vast expense claim'. Now Companion aims to banish all those scraps to the celestial doodling pad. It is a suite of programs which sit in the background as you run whatever programs you want, and then at the press of a key up pops a calculator, an electronic jotting pad and other facilities. The main point is that Companion runs at the same time as other programs - you don't have to swap discs and load new programs. What are companions for? Companion offers a wide variety of features, some more useful than others. A calculator gives you simple four-function arithmetic with a memory and percentages. You can set up a clock, and do simple disc maintenance operations like listing the directory, browsing through text files and showing the disc space left. On a slightly more sophisticated level, there are a variety of notepads. First, a simple jotter allows you to commit your scribblings to disc as the urge takes you. Second, you have a phone book for recording numbers -this is essentially a notepad sorted by the first letter of each line. Finally, a diary/calendar means you can organise your notes and appointments by their dates. Swinging into action In order to use Companion, you first have to run a program called INSTALL to reserve the workspace it needs. After this, you use the PCW normally, running whatever program you want until the urge to take a memo becomes irresistable. At this point, you press [EXTRA] +P. In the top left of the screen a menu drops down offering a range of options. You use this much like the familiar LocoScript menus, by using the cursor-down key to highlight the option and [ENTER] to select the action. The topmost three selections are the simplest to use. They are 'resident' functions, meaning they stay in the computer's memory at all times, so they they run fast. The calculator has a pleasant graphic display, and uses the PCW's numeric keypad for input. The clock can be set to any time, and from then on displays as a digital clock in the status line. By contrast, the three notepad-type functions are read in from disc when you run them, which means (a) they take a annoyingly long time to get going, and (b) you have to have the Companion disc in the A drive to use them, which may cause some inconvenience to owners of 8256's. The notepads are 12 rows by 32 columns in a window at the top left of the screen, which is pokey but useable. You can store a good number of notes and phone numbers, since they are saved as disc files. Unfortunately, as aconsequence, the notepad data files fill up almost all of both sides of the A disc. Companionable results? Like the curate's egg, the Companion is good in parts. This kind of'utility' program can be more trouble than it's worth to use, but if you like this kind of thing then this is the kind of thing you will like. Being able to have a clock permanently showing is handy, and the calculator and disc utilities are simple and worthwhile. However, the three notepad functions (jotter, phone book and calendar) are white elephants. They are too bulky, slow and awkward to offer a real alternative to a paper notepad - pity they couldn't be dropped and the price halved. Definitely a Christmas present sort of program.
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