What do you want?

Simon Coward

My first computer was a 1040STe, I bought it for word processing to help 
with my work. As it was a family curriculum pack it came with ST Calc, and 
so quickly took over the mission accounts and then launched me into the 
world of desktop publishing through the famous ST Review cover disk 
version of Timeworks. Incredibly my original setup was a black and white 
TV and a 9 pin printer but I had a system that could do what I wanted.

As the years went on more RAM, high res monitor and finally a hard drive 
arrived on the desk and software to go with it. I multitasked under MagiC, 
and scaled my vector fonts in Papyrus, the ST did all I wanted and was 
only replaced by a Falcon to cope with image processing, but can it still 
do all I want?

The answer to that is "yes" and "no". It's hardware can do what I want if 
the software was available to do it and this now is a problem for Atari 
owners. At the same time it's a problem for programmers, what do people 
want. Earlier this year I took up programming and wrote Rotator, a text 
rotation program similar to the power text feature in Pressworks on the 
PC. I was in the fortunate position of having the time to be able to write 
this, but what about the rest of you, what do you want?

Among Atari owners we have some very talented programmers and it's time 
that they knew what you wanted, this year I wrote a photographers database 
because someone asked and have other plans for programs that people want. 
However, there are programs I would like that I cannot write myself, games 
for example, I would like a "Dune 2" clone or "Panzer General", I know a 
Falcon owner who wants a "video editing program" which I will look into 
when Rotator is upgraded. Send in your requests and maybe some programmer 
will respond, it is far more encouraging for a programmer to work on 
something when he knows someone wants it.

At the same time programming takes time, a lot of time. I wondered if I 
would ever finish the first version of Rotator and almost gave up many a 
time. If people are willing to go through this torment, then we, the end 
user must be willing to pay our shareware fees to encourage further 
programs to be developed. I don't think anyone's going to get rich writing 
shareware for the Atari, but at least it helps to offset the cost of books 
and programming languages as well as being a real encouragement to the 
poor guy who's locked himself in his room for three months to write the 
code.

What do you want? If we want new software we have to let programmers know 
what we want, and when they've finished, we need to let them know we 
appreciate their hard work.