[WriteLog] K9JY website : An appreciation.

[Don Cassel]

I really like Writelog and haven't used anything else that could replace it
for the types of operations that I do. Like others in this thread I find
setup to be a hassle especially when moving to a different environment. 

Last weekend we setup M/2 and had a bunch of network problems through
Saturday which mysteriously cleared up by Sunday. One of two laptops had to
be rebooted a number of times and WL had to be manually reconnected to get
them synchronized. We agonized over the duplicate serial numbers (yes I had
read the discussions on the reflector) and eventually came to accept that at
some point in the log a number was skipped to compensate for the dupe. To
the best of my knowledge though I'm am fairly certain we didn't lose any
data. In mid-contest I saw the menu choice to use separate numbers for each
station but didn't want to risk changing in mid course. A startup selection
for multis could present this as an option prior to beginning the contest.

Silly thing that popped up on both computers was autosave was not working. I
had to scurry around to recall the command to be used in the ini file and
then enter it (wrong the first time) and then restart WL on each computer.
Also one of the computers was scoring HA incorrectly and giving points to VE
when it shouldn't. It took me awhile to realize that the CallPrefix entry in
the ini file was somehow garbage characters. Entering our callsign fixed
that problem, oh yes after another restart.

Many of these difficulties could be overcome if ini file editing was
unnecessary as it is in most Windows software. Instead a dialog box with
folders should be present in maybe a Tools or Options menu that lets you set
most of the ini parameters from within Writelog and then saves the changes
to the ini file without the necessity to restart the program. The current
approach is difficult at best because you don't always know what ini setting
you need or the exact command required. 

Maybe it's time for a Release 11 with many of the changes that have been
suggested here over recent months.

Don VE3XD