Re: Outliners + PIMs + Arrange +WebArranger

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 642

Posted by dienes
2000-06-28 10:12:17

Hi there!

I was very pleased to stumble onto your discussion list—I have been using More, Nisus, Arrange for years, consider them to be among the very best software for writing and thinking people.

I was extremely pleased (and relieved!) to find out that More 3.1 runs under Mac OS 9 (which I have just upgraded to). Of the other two, Nisus is still alive, thank God, but Arrange (WebArranger) is not.

I have a couple of questions and I very much hope that Dave or or others on the list can help me with my problem or guide me in the right direction.

First, about More. Are there any translators of More outlines 1. into plain html bulleted lists? and 2. into PowerPoint format? (I have lots of old More outlines that unfortunately I may need to put on the web or transfer to the Windows platform.)

Second, about Arrange (or WebArranger). I use Arrange as a text database and a collector and organizer of disparate materials (for which it is an almost ideal tool for me). It is not really an outliner, so perhaps this is not the right forum for this query.

Here is the problem. Arrange (WebArranger) seems to be working just fine under OS 9 until or unless a file gets to be circa 150 K. At that point the file refuses to be saved any more, saying “Sorry, not enough free disk space”. No saving (or in fact any other operation) is possible after this point, including deleting contents from the file to reduce its size. All I can do is quit without saving changes… (There are several GIGAbytes of free disk space available, so obviously something else is going on.) More correctly, I can go on working with the file, add notes, delete them, etc., but when I try to save the file, I cannot, so all my actions are lost. None of this happens as long as file size is under 150 K or so.

Also, when I try to Save As, it works first, but then the newly saved copy (under a different name) also gives the “not enough disk space” warning when trying to save it subsequently. If I try to Save As with same name (and click Replace), the warning says something like “unable to save, due to disk error; file is already open for write”.

I of course trashed the Pref files, rebooted with Extensions off, turned off virtual memory to see if that helps (the Arrange manual talks about Arrange having its own virtual memory management system…). By the way, the regular tiny “Saving…” window also appears behind the “not enough disk space” window (as it would normally do), and in the Finder directory the Last Modified date updates, even though none of the changes are saved at that date and the file appears totally “unmodified”...

The references to “free disk space” and “disk error” are puzzling and may be a clue for experts. All this is happening on a new PowerBook (running under OS 9.0.2, with its hard drive formatted with HFS+, unlike the other machines which were all HFS and ran under OS 7.x or 8.6). All other programs appear to be working all right.

Two people on this list (Dave Rogers and Jan Erik Mostrˆm) thought the problem had to do with HFS Plus. And indeed, saving to a HFS ZIP disk is no problem. Moreover, creating a small HFS formatted disk image and saving to it (Dave’s idea) also appears to be working.

I am not a technical person, so I would like to find out if I can be reasonably sure that my problem was entirely and exclusively due to the HFS+ ? I am asking because I would of course like to avoid further misery… Does it matter, for example, whether the app itself sits on my HFS+ formatted hard drive? Should I move it, too, to a HFS Zip disk, a disk image or a partition? What other problems am I likely to run into? In other words, just how risky it is to continue with this particular partial incompatibility? (I did a little searching on the web, but neither any of the Apple sites, nor the Mac sites seem to talk about this particular kind of saving problem in connection with HFS+.) Can anyone give me advice as to how to solve this problem safely? HUGE thanks in advance!

Another matter: If this problem is solvable and if Arrange is basically compatible with OS 9, I would really hate to see this brilliant software wasted as well! Maybe it could join other “antique” programs like More, and be resurrected and re-released? I am sure a small (perhaps) but dedicated group of users would love to see that! Perhaps CE would be as generous as Symantec and would allow its free dissemination?

Dave, you may well know some of the people behind this program (Scott Wiener, Ben Weiss, Steve Newman, Roy Harvey, Stephanie Wright). They did many things in Arrange that seem to go back to More, like hoisting, gathering, cloning, etc. (In fact, Arrange almost seems like a database version of More!...) Maybe you could suggest this to them?

Lots of thanks in advance, and sorry for such a long posting!
Laszlo

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