Coming Soon from Dangerous Cybernetics! Mail Grazer and Global Reader Copyright 1995 by Todd Henschell This will formally announce that Dangerous Cybernetics has begun the development of Mail Grazer(tm), our Usenet News and E-mail to QWK utility that will let CMPQwk users read their UseNet news and E-mail with CMPQwk. We've also completed all of the paperwork and design goals for Global Reader(tm), which will be underway after Mail Grazer .90 beta ships to the public several months from now. Global Reader...What is it? Global Reader will be the logical upgrade path for CMPQwk users who move to a 32-bit operating system. Global Reader will require a modern 32 bit OS such as Windows NT 3.51 or Windows '95. It will take full advantage of all of the attributes of those operating systems including long filenames, 32-bit memory management, multiple threads, and so forth. Global Reader will very likely not be available to the public for at least another eight months. Therefore, it's too soon to announce a release date. Nonetheless, the project is finally--- and formally (legally and all that)---underway. Global Reader will superficially resemble CMPQwk including those features which make CMPQwk a success. However it will be a more powerful application that should satisfy the most power-hungry users. Mail Grazer Mail Grazer is for those CMPQwk users who don't want to wait for Global Reader and would like to read UseNet News and E-mail with their favorite mail reader and do it soon. Mail Grazer will be a small and simple application you can use to collect Mail through a Winsock- compatible link to your favorite Internet service. It will seamlessly handle things such as UUEncoding and decoding. You will attach a file with CMPQwk and Mail Grazer takes care of the rest. Long messages can be split into a manageable size, if you like, and will be CMPQwk friendly. Mail Grazer should appear as a public beta within several months in both 16-bit and 32-bit versions. A release date is yet to be announced. Who Are the Authors? Both applications have been conceived and designed by Todd Henschell and are being programmed (the hard part) by a top-flight C++ and Assembler programmer, Mike W. Smith, who is working under contract to Dangerous Cybernetics. Mike has worked on low-level device drivers, programmed MIDI hardware and firmware, and has a popular MPU-401 dual port MIDI adapter produced by MIDIMan that is sold all over the world. Given his skills at very low-level Assembly hardware programming, I anticipate superb, elegant, and very reliable C++ code. Both applications will also be inherently portable to the Mac, to OS/2, and to UNIX systems. Mike as a good and tolerant friend is willing to put up with most of my insane demands like tagline file definitions for each BBS for those who want to set them up, a multi-threaded background-running search engine with complex Boolean expressions, and a powerful unlimited-size DBase-compatible database engine handling the folders. These are just a few of the items listed in the eleven page single-spaced improvements over CMPQwk as part of the design goals. Derek Backus, the author of CMPQwk, is not affiliated with either project -for those of you who are curious about such matters. He has elected to pursue other types of software such as hangman games and sysop utilities for Galacticomm Worldgroup. Beta Testing Once each product is ready for beta testing, it will be announced on the Cmpqwk RIME conference. If you wish to beta test internally for us, you must have an Internet connection where you can receive MIME-encoded attachments. For those who have expressed interest in beta testing the first out of the gate Mail Grazer, e-mail me at scraz@primenet.com. I'll reply with an e-mail in MS Write format file for you to print, sign, and return to us. We will be accepting ten internal beta testers on a first-come, first- serve basis at first. They'll receive (obviously) free registrations to Mail Grazer in exchange for their help during development so long as they follow the terms of the NDA and file regular reports. Registered CMPQwk users will receive preference over ANY other applicants Upgrades Once each product is released, we will announce upgrade pricing. Suffice to say that I want to keep CMPQwk users in our family, and those users who want to upgrade and are running Windows '95 or NT 3.51 in the case of Global Reader, will be more than welcome to do so. Prices to be announced. I'll also be posting a FAQ message that will answer many of the questions we've received recently about CMPQwk and Gator Edit. I'm looking forward to diving into both of these projects. And both will be supported here in the RIME Cmpqwk conference and via Internet links, just as CMPQwk and Gator are supported. Todd Henschell is the creator of the wonderful Cmpqwk help files and has been intimately involved in the Cmpqwk off line reader program. Todd can be reached by email at henschel@patchbay.com or through RIME ->487 . ww