Letters to the Ed

 From: Peter Hughes <P.Hughes@mailbox.uq.oz.au> 

John (sic) congratulations on a healthy looking production - I look forward
to further editions of Amiga_Link - however if this production is to
maintain credibility I feel that a review should be totally honest in its
scoring or it loses credibilty very fast.

     We at Amiga Link understand this, as shown by the review in this issue;
we were hardly kind to Akira, and Guardian and Cybergames didn't get great
reviews either. 

I refer to the review by Roy Millican of Pagestream3 in your last issue - a
very good article indeed however Roy concludes by saying:-

"On a scale from 1-10, 10 being the Highest, I give it a 10"

Yet he mentioned many bugs and the fact (unfortunately) that Pagestream3
still had many features not working:-

"Many bugs were present, and some features not working, but most have been
fixed.  My biggest complaint is that you have to figure out and set the
screen DPI when using a graphics board.   

- You cannot apply colors to text using the Color Palette. - The Line/Fill
button in the toolbar cannot be used for text - You can't copy and paste (or
duplicate/transform) text frames. - Color separations don't work."

I therefore fail to see how a product can attract a 100% rating after
comments such as these. Maybe Roy became slightly over enthusiastic and
supportive of Soft-Logik, however the fact remains that they released a very
unstable product and then tried to blame the users for forcing them to an
early release. It would appear that all was not well in the Soft-Logik
stable and after jumping from the starting gate they failed to maintain the
lead as per the press releases they issued.

     You feel that Roy should not have given it such a high rating, and
perhaps you are right, but on the other hand Roy did give many reasons for
why this is a great product.  I think the best example of all is that Roy
uses PageStream 3 in his DTP business, which shows that it is far more than
usable.

No answer has been given to the punters who backed this product - could  a
change of jockey have been the cause, I mean Dan Weiss had been riding this
product for a long time and suddenly disappears. I personally have received
less than acceptable support from Soft-Logik in recent times. It would
appear that after long period of Pagestream use and sending Soft-Logik
printed copies of productions (airmailed to the States at my expense) plus
disk files of the productions.

  I did not rate an upgrade under the agreement even though my copy was
registered and the correct package. This is not sour grapes - there must be
many others like me that are extremely disappointed.

     This is not really related to how good the product is, though.  It
sounds as if you are more aggrevated at the poor support and poor timing of
the release by Soft-Logik than at the program.  Remember, Roy was reviewing
v3.0g, not v3.

I for one am very disappointed with the performance of Pagestream3 and will
continue to use Pagestream2.2, because it works. It certainly does not have
the whistles and bells of other DTP Programs but, it works.

There is an old saying "Garbage In Garbage Out" but in the case of
Pagestream3 it is a case of "Garbage In Lucky To Get Anything Out"

Once again congratulations to all involved in the production of  Amiga_Link
and I hope Roy Millican takes my comments in the  constructive spirit they
were written.

Regards

Peter Hughes Australia

     I'm sure that Roy has payed close attention to your letter, as he would
to any letter which commented on his articles.  Thanks a lot for your
letter.

     Come on people, surely Peter Hughers isn't the only person who has
comments about the mag!  Write us at Zool@cyberwar.com !