The Revo's Grassy Knoll

Revo utan Sketch

Det pratas en hel del om att Revo saknar Sketch. Här nedan är en (ganska underhållande) artikel om problemet. Och se, det finns en lösning - tills vidare i alla fall. Texten är hämtad från Your EPOC.

Artikelförfattare: Ewan Spence
Your EPOC, issue 1, May 2000 http://www.yourepoc.co.uk

The Revo's Grassy Knoll

Ewan:

I'm fuming. Nor simmering gently at Gas Mark 4 for twenty minutes like Deliah suggests. But fuming like I never have before. And for the first time, I'm ready to spill Psion's blood over this one.

I'm standing here on my grassy knoll, holding one of the sexiest pieces of technology to come out of Psion in years. The Revo. But like any blonde bombshell that the teenage right hand yearns for, it's missing that certain something. A centrefold picture.

Or to put it more precisely, Sketch. Not only is it missing from the Revo's 8mb Rom chip (which isn't exactly full at the moment), but it's not available on the supplied CD as an add on product (such as the Epoc Web browser and the Spell Checker). Nor is there any mention of it on the Psion website or support pages. It's been exorcised like a bad relation nobody wants anymore.

Except the public want it. Sketch is a genuinely useful app, and probably makes more sense on the Revo than any other Psion machine. For drawing quick maps when getting directions over the phone to jotting down a room layout, its uses are countless. With the Revo's size, it would have been the perfect match.

But it was left out. Which meant Word documents could no longer have embedded graphics. No signatures added to the bottom of a letter you've drafted on the road ready to copy over to the office PC. Data files can't have handy pictures of album covers, or the train engines you're spotting that day. Help files lose the ability to have labelled screen shots, guides to the Icons and other useful things.

Put it simply, you have lost a lot of functionality.

And every Revo owner has put up with this, made no comment and taken it like the submissive users Psion hope we are. Well not this owner.

It all started when I received my netBook - an absolutely impressive machine which restored my faith in Psion for thirty minutes. A quick explanation of the netBook's main difference in its guts will now follow (because even a dimwit can spot the colour screen). Pay attention, this is important.

The netBook has no Rom chip as such. Instead it has much more Ram (32mb) which allows you to load the Operating System (currently ER5) from the supplied Compact Flash or CD. After playing around with the new machine for a few hours I decided to reinstall ER5 as I had found an option to 'mix and match' the built in applications (Word, Sheet, Data, et al) so you only needed to load the ones you wanted. And it was then something clicked.

After you have loaded the core of ER5, the apps are loaded into the C:/System/Apps directory via the standard Epoc SIS Installation files. And all the file formats and identifiers have to be the same across the range so that each file type can run on all the machines from the Series 5 Classic to the stylish Revo. And one of those SIS was called Paint. Which we all know by another name. Sketch.

It was all of ten seconds work to drop my Revo into it's Soap Dish Docking Station and install the SIS from it's hiding place on the NetBook CD (CD_Drive:/Extras/Apps/Paint.sis if you're interested...). Touch the Extras button there was the Sketch icon waiting for me to run it. Had I found the 'fudge' that would allow the Revo User limited access to Sketch? No. I had found a conspiracy.

Because the Sketch program is optimised to run on the Revo!!!

Now if this was a NetBook program I would expect dialogs to overshoot the screen size, the toolbar to be completely indecipherable and a million other problems that OPL authors are having to deal with when converting their programs between platforms. I was wrong. A quick glance showed that...

• the Toolbar is reworked and only shows the four grey pallet.
• the Text Tool has a reworked 'Set Font' dialog that split the Font and Style options over two dialog panes to cope with the smaller screen height.
• new Sketch files are automatically scaled to fit the Revo's smaller screen (396 x 146)

And here is the screenshot.

The conspiracy deepens. Because once you've installed Sketch, you suddenly find that all those Databases and Help files that had the question mark of an unknown file on display suddenly show you a graphic, a picture, a map with directions to the Book Depository, etc.

Power up Word, and choose and 'Other Object...' from the Insert menu. Lo and behold, you can choose Sketch and embed your signature in a word document. Or add a company logo! And you can do the same in Data. And Agenda!

Sketch is 100% ready for the Revo. The Revo is 110% ready for Sketch. Psion deliberately left it out. And the company I have looked up to for so long is stranded in its Ivory Tower.

What the hell is going in with Psion? Surely someone somewhere would realise that Sketch was ready for the Revo. This is not a case of bad management, this is a deliberate decision to cripple the Revo.

Even if we accept the excuse that it would be too expensive to re-master the Rom chip, how difficult would it be to add Sketch onto the Revo CD-Rom with a note saying...

'This program takes up 104K [I've ignored the 72K colour clipart file - Ewan], but will increase the productivity, the visual appeal, the usefulness and the practicality of your Revo. It's your call.'

Psion rightly expect you to use 180K to install the Web browser, and even give you the choice of installing a Spellchecker at 800K! Why not 104K for Sketch?

Look at what is in the Rom. E-setup is something that is useful to many Revo users. It helps you set up your Internet connection. But you are only going to use it once, and then never look at again. Surely anyone with two brain cells is going to place this on the CD-Rom alongside the Web Browser and use the spare space to have Sketch pre-installed on the Rom.

Or how about the expansive 340 entry help file which nobody ever looks at. Even editing it down would surely make up the space needed.

It boils down to this. Sketch is very useful. Every reviewer has commented that the Revo could do with Sketch. Every user has at some point wished they had Sketch, even if it is to look at a pretty picture in a useless Word file.

And Psion have had it in their hands to do something about it all along. Someone in Psion will read this, of that I am sure. Please, just say "we're sorry, it's on the website," and let us get on with it. How difficult is it to make the SIS available for download? How difficult is it to listen to all the different groups in the computing press? How difficult is it to listen to your customers? And how difficult is it to treat us like adults and let us make an informed decision about how we use our personal computer?

(c) Ewan Spence, Your EPOC

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