Copyright 1991 Sudden Incorporated, Rod Coleman Favorite Recipes Now that you understand some of the features in Sudden View, I will present a few ideas about how to use them. As you have seen, Sudden View can help you do normal text editing in a reasonable way, but there are a few applications where it can make a major difference. In this file I will describe a few of those special applications. Some you may already be using. Others you might not have thought about yet. In either case, I hope these suggestions help in your understanding and use of Live Editing. Obvious Applications Obviously, you can use Sudden View for all of the normal text editing work. It's handy for producing letters, memos, and draft copies of more involved documents. The larger the document, the more effective Sudden View is at moving sentences, paragraphs and chapters around until they fit your thinking. It's also good for arranging tables of data and other non-wrapped text. Even with simple documents, Implied Editing Action and the formatting features can be a real advantage. Dynamic Arrangement also can make modifying a standard memo a lot faster than typing in a new one. Personal Address Book Personal phone and address lists are usually longer than one screen but small enough to be left on-line for instant reference. Sudden View supports this type of use very effectively. The list can be entered and arranged in any fashion you like. It can then be left in one of the file slots of an accessory configuration of Sudden View. This way, you can quickly refer to any needed information whether you are currently editing another file or not. If you name your list "SV.RSC" and place it in the root directory, it will automatically be loaded when ever you boot your system. This is a handy side effect of the README.1ST auto-load feature. Don't forget to save any changes you make. Software Development Tool This is one application where I have some experience. I have used everything from card punches to screen editors in developing software. Before Sudden View, I always considered the concept of the paperless office a myth; well, at least when it came to programming. Until recently, I have always written code, printed listings, mark up the listings and then edited the code. Paper was always faster than the editor for reviewing my work. My listings got a special work-out during de-bugging. I'm not sure when it happened, but during the last several months, I have been making fewer and fewer listings. With Sudden View, it's actually faster to suck in the file and find the error, than it is to flip through the listings. I now have listings more than four months old. I just haven't needed to print new ones out. Another change in my coding habits is that I no longer write code: I arrange it. Instead of typing in a routine, I find a similar one, make a copy and then hack it up. I have been doing this for years, but not nearly as much, nor as effectively as I do with Sudden View. I can't remember the last time I actually wrote a fresh routine from scratch. Not only is the Line Move feature handy for altering and copying assembly code, the Field Move is great for dragging a chunk of Modula-2 code four spaces to the right so I can LOOP it. Hacking up individual lines using Character Moves is also useful. Though Sudden View does not have macro features, the Power keys, Find & Replace and Dynamic Arrangement make things fast enough form most work. WARNING! - This use of Sudden View for this application is addictive. Bulletin Board Support If you've ever down-loaded a huge text file and then tossed it because you didn't want to page through it, Sudden View offers a new, faster way of scanning text. If you get the Personalized version, you can configure a large workspace, load in any size file, and then scan it as fast as you like. You also can do keyword searches much faster than conventional word processors. I have used Sudden View as an alternative to the capture buffer in Flash for chopping un-needed text before a final save. It will activate from the GEM window and is also good for preparing downloads. Work Scheduler Most managers have to schedule their employees work hours. Some use a text spreadsheet of days and hours, and then pencil in names. By the end of the week, it's generally a scribbled up mess; and sometimes worse: unreadable. By using the Field Cut and Paste features of Sudden View, you can dramatically simplify this chore. First form a standard table and then use the Field Move to arrange the schedule as needed. Just right click on the employee and move them from 6:00 to 7:00 or Wednesday to Thursday. Print out a fresh copy whenever you need it. Thought Processor This may sound a little exotic, but it's not. Thought Processing just means that you don't have to have all of your thoughts together before you enter them. Because Sudden View will allow you to move text around so easily, you can enter now, and think later. It's easier when you can see what you are thinking about. Just start entering your thoughts in any order. Later you can grab and re-arrange them as needed. It's similar to outlining, except that you don't have to conform to any structure. You can format, duplicate and present ideas as you need to. Don't worry, you can always make sense later. Customer Data Base Data Base programs are useful for structuring your data, but can be pretty clumsy at presenting it - Sudden View to the rescue. If you bring up a data base and then print it to a file, you can load the file into Sudden View and get much faster access to the information. For instance if you load a copy of your Customer Data Base, you can use it to quickly validate customer numbers and addresses. You can organize it by last name and then search for other fields as needed using the Find operation. It's faster than virtually any data base. Price Lists Again, Sudden View's ability to be faster than paper can make it very useful for information like price lists or stock status reports. As in the above example, print the data base to a file, and then load the file into Sudden View. Every morning download a copy from the networked inventory system and pop it into an Atari 520 ST for viewing. Now you don't have to wait for the mainframe or tie up the expensive workstation to make quick references. Proposal Generator The last two example files also will come in very handy if you need to produce a fast proposal. Just grab the name and address from the customer file and load it into a standard proposal form. Add the pricing and description information from the price file and finish with any needed comments - flash, you're done! General Search Tool As I mentioned above, Sudden View is very effective at doing Find operations. It will scan for a pattern at between one hundred and two hundred thousand characters per second. This is fast enough to be useful on even large files. So even if you had never considered using an accessory text editor to search a serial number table, give Sudden View a try; it might surprise you.