by Beverly Rosenbaum
The Shareware Industry Conference recently held its annual awards ceremony in Warwick, Rhode Island, to name the 1998 winners. This year’s winners have the added feature of being Year 2000 compliant. I’d like to tell you about a few of the top programs, and you can see the entire list of winners at http://www.sic.org/awards98.html. Low-cost shareware affords you the opportunity to try before you buy. If you like the programs and wish to continue using them beyond a trial period, please support their authors by sending them your payment.
AS-EASY-AS for Win95/NT from Trius, Inc., received the Best Application Award. This excellent program has been around for many years. The powerful 32-bit spreadsheet program, also still available for DOS, has over 130 math, financial, scientific, statistical, string, date and time functions. Some of the features include superb graphics, a new macro programming language implementation, file linking, integration & recursion, as well as Gaussian & Poisson distributions. It is Year 2000 ready and requires only 3.5 MB of hard disk space and Win95 or NT running on a Pentium system.
Functions include mathematical, trigonometric, statistical, logical, financial, date, time, string, engineering, scientific, internal and external user-defined. Graph types are x-y, line, bar, stacked bar, pie, hi-low-open-close, delta, cumulative, contour, area, radar, polar, strip, wall, semi-log, log-log. Table size is 8,192 rows by 256 columns, with multiple files & views up to 64 3-d pages per worksheet, dynamic file linking, lookup tables, single and double interpolation, print preview, and file auto-load.
AS-EASY-AS for Win95/NT was also selected as one of the five finalists in the 5th Annual ZDNet Best Application Award category for 1998. The price is $59 plus s/h, and a trial copy can be downloaded from http://www.trius.com/.
Graphics Tool
ThumbsPlus from Cerious Software was chosen the Shareware Industry Conference 1998 Graphics/Multimedia Program of the Year, edging out last year’s winner, JASC Inc.’s Paintshop Pro. This is a graphic file viewer, locator and organizer that simplifies the process of finding and maintaining graphics, clip-art files, fonts and animations. It displays a small image or thumbnail of each file. You can use ThumbsPlus to browse, view, edit, crop, launch external editors, and copy images to the clipboard. You can use drag-and-drop to organize graphics files by moving them to appropriate directories. ThumbsPlus will also create a slide show from selected graphics, and install bitmap files as Windows wallpaper.
You can print individual graphics files, or the thumbnails themselves as a catalog. ThumbsPlus can convert to several formats, either one at a time or in batch mode. You can also perform image editing in batch mode and rasterize or convert metafile graphics to bitmaps.
ThumbsPlus can process dozens of file types internally and uses Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to create thumbnails. You can view any proprietary file type for which you have the server application loaded on your system.
ThumbsPlus is fully year 2000 compliant, processes and stores file dates in Unix format, and can handle dates until the year 2106 without problems. Price: $60. A pre-release Macintosh version is also available for $45, with a free upgrade to the final version. Download shareware from http://www.cerious.com/.
Best Utility
No newcomer to these awards, Canyon Software captured the Best Utility Award for its Drag and View program. When you receive files like a client database in FoxPro, some memos written in Word, a few documents in WordPerfect, and various charts, spreadsheets, and graphics for which you don’t have the original applications, you can still see the contents of the files using Drag And View.
You can also view, rotate, flip, convert and perform color effects on bitmap and vector graphics, convert between 17 bitmapped formats, do screen captures, and copy to and paste from the clipboard.
You can view word processing documents such as Word, Works, WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Q&AWrite, ASCII, HEX, and a special DWG version views, prints and zooms AutoCAD DWG files.You can view spreadsheet files from Excel, Lotus, or Quattro, and database files from FoxPro, Clipper, or dBase. You can play animated GIF files, MIDI, WAV and RMI sound files, and Digital Video AVI files. Drag and View displays the latest internet formats, including interlaced GIF, progessive JPEG and PNG.
This program also displays HTML with Internet Explorer Active X control, and functions well as a quick and dirty HTML editor. Drag And View supports Windows 95 or 98, Windows NT, and Windows 3.1x.
Check it out at http://www.canyonsw.com/. It’s only $30, if you decide to buy it.
Internet Utility
The award for the Best Internet Program/Utility went to Download Butler, from Lincoln Beach Software, Inc. It automates the file download process by capturing downloads directly from your browser, organizing and storing them in a dynamic tree layout for easy access.
A few of the highlights include a built-in unZip program that allows you to easily extract any file and launch the setup program automatically if one is found. When you extract a file using Download Butler it will keep track of the number of files and where you extracted them to.
The downloader supports both HTTP and FTP protocols, and will resume broken downloads where supported by the server you are connected to. It has a built-in Windows Explorer View that gives you instant access to your system and allows you to easily drag/drop files into Download Butler.
Using its report generator, you see at a glance all of the files you have set up in Download Butler, with details like file counts, file sizes, dates and times. There is also a customizable HTML report viewer that you can send to your browser, view and print.
Another useful feature is the ability to execute third party programs, such as a virus scanner. Up to four applications can be specified and toggled to be executed when a new file is being processed. These can also be accessed from the menu, so you can easily run the virus scanner on a particular file at a later time.
Download Butler can associate a URL with each file so it can be re-retrieved, and it supports ZIP, ARC, ARJ, ZOO, RAR, TAR, GZIP, LHA and SFX compressed files. The program stores any file and understands their extension associations, like .txt=notepad. Cost is $29.95. Look for it at http://www.lincolnbeach.com/. At Lincoln Beach Software Inc., their motto is “helping to prevent global warming by writing cool software.”
Beverly Rosenbaum is a HAL-PC member who can be contacted at brosen@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.