Subject: From: Date:

Re: [ECS] [Fwd: ECS] Bill Walters Mon, 10 Aug 1998 15:05:55 -0500

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Mark,

Your new customer is unfortunately, right in a number of his observations.
What he doesn't know (and no reason that he should) is that the genesis of ECS
is from DOS and that all of your work has been involved in making the program
Windows based.  You haven't worked on changing any of the documention to
reflect the windows OS.  I don't mean that harshly, as I'm a very big fan of
ECS!  However, in my opinion, someone who is a Windows "purist" would be
mystified and upset at all the strangeness of the documentation and
installation.

I believe you're right in that he ran SETUP instead of INSTALL (that's what he
says right in his note).  He's guilty of not reading the documentation -
however, most windows based programs use SETUP for the install and when a
customer uses the "Add/Remove" new programs applet in CONTROL PANEL it looks
for SETUP.EXE by default.

Maybe you could create two packages - ECSW and ECS/ECST.  ECSW would be geared
for windows with windows based docs (yep, .DOC = Word and .TXT means
notepad).  You could use a word processor and substitute the line character
for the A with 2 dots over it (it DOES look really ugly in notepad or WORD)
and provide whatever "front-end" installer (Install Shield?) which would
create a default directory under \Program Files but changable by the user.

Anyway, while I strongly dislike the tone he's used, he's generally right in
what user's expect in windows based programs.

Bill Walters


Mark Gilmore wrote:

> I would appreciate any constructive criticism regarding
> the following comments from a frustrated installer.
>
> Please do NOT respond to him, as I did not get his permission.
>
> BTW, The install directions ARE in the README.TXT (I downloaded
> it and checked), and I think he ran SETUP instead of INSTALL.
>
> Should I rename *.DOC to *.TXT to avoid various editors from
> assuming a format other than plain text ?
>
> Thanks.

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