As a part-time shareware author, I don't have much of a marketing
budget for software I develop. Unfortunately, products generally
do not sell themselves, especially if people are unfamiliar with
them. Thus, I'm sharing the following article with potentially
interested persons. It reviews Talking Directory, a speech and
braille friendly program for managing files, directories, and
programs on a computer that supports DOS applications. The review
appears in the current, June 1997 issue of the Braille Forum,
published by the American Council of the Blind. I did not discuss
its content with the writer. If anyone wants further information,
feel free to either contact me directly or post questions to a
public list to which I subscribe. A trial version of
Talking Directory may be retrieved from the web as
http://www.empowermentzone.com/td20.zip
Jamal
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HIS SOFTWARE PUTS THE DAZZLE BACK IN DOS
by Nolan Crabb
I've participated in numerous computer-related conversations
over the past several years with a variety of people. In a great
number of these conversations, Jamal Mazrui's name would pop up
along with some very complimentary words about a program he created
called Talking Directory. I'd hear phrases like "I'm always using
it ... " and "I don't know what I'd do without it. ... "
I knew, vaguely, what Talking Directory was -- a program that
would allow me to move through my directories in DOS on my
computer's hard drive and manipulate the files in a variety of
ways. I never felt a need to own such a program. I've always been
such a hard case when it came to DOS that I felt I could always do
things more quickly simply by typing in commands rather than moving
through menus and the like.
When Mazrui offered me a copy of Talking Directory 2.0 to
review for this magazine, I accepted eagerly, but I knew I'd be a
hard sell. My mind set was that menu-driven programs were for
wimps, and that if you really wanted to do the DOS dance with your
machine, you had to do it from the keyboard, remembering almost
endless streams of esoteric commands that aren't English at all.
Since I began using Talking Directory 2.0, I've become converted to
the program's seamless operation. You see, Talking Directory is
far more than a menu-driven system where you move the arrow keys
and hit enter to execute a program or somehow change a file. If it
weren't, I'd have politely wished the author well and been
unimpressed with his software. The bottom line is, if you play
with this program at all, you'll be anything but unimpressed, even
if you're an old command-line hard liner such as I have been.
The Manual
Mazrui appears to be a rare bird indeed. In the software
development world, there are those who can develop wonderful
software and there are those who can write wonderful users'
manuals. Usually, the two never converge in one individual. The
Talking Directory 2.0 manual is concise, friendly, and even in
plain English. This is not the manual to have, however, if you're
pulling your computer out of the box for the first time. It
assumes you know a little something about DOS (the Microsoft Disk
Operating System) and how DOS works with your files and directories
on your computer's hard disk. But since it says that right up
front, there's no deception and no time wasted reading something
you can't understand. The joy of this manual, however, is you
don't have to know all things regarding DOS to succeed with the
manual or the program. There's very little in here that gives you
verbal whiplash. The program is not overly complex, but I don't
recommend just diving into it without at least one pass through the
manual. (Read it a second time while you're playing with the
program; that will help solidify the concepts you'll need to make
the program perform at its best.) The on-disk manual is written
well enough that a single pass through it and some preliminary
playing around with the program and the help information will get
you up, running, and happy with the results.
Installation
Talking Directory 2.0 was installed quickly and easily on my
computer's hard drive. The installation routine is chatty enough
that you don't need any sighted assistance to get it on your
machine. The manual covers the installation procedure thoroughly,
and there are no unpleasant surprises. Once installed, you simply
type TD to run the program. The first time it runs, you're asked
a series of questions about your hard drive -- easy questions.
They're so easy, in fact, you can simply press enter to accept the
answers already provided.
What Can It Do?
This little program not only includes a host of its own
commands, but it gives you a variety of possibilities to create
your own commands so that you can enter your favorite word
processor with a single keystroke, for example. It's capable of
helping you view the contents of almost any word processing file
regardless of what word processor was used to create it. You can
perform single commands on multiple files. Let's say, for example,
that you want to delete or move six files in a directory. You can
tag or mark files and then perform the command on all of them at
once.
You can index your directories in the program such that
directories and files can be sorted based on date/time, size, file
name or file extension. While this doesn't change the physical
location of the files on your disk, it's a great way to sort files
by name or even age. You can compress and decompress files (a
process known as zipping and unzipping) from within the Talking
Directory program. A few simple keystrokes take the place of what
can be some convoluted DOS commands that do the same thing.
With single keystrokes, you can jump through your directories,
go to a specific directory, and jump around among the files in that
directory. The commands are written such that they become quite
easy to remember after only a little use.
The built-in viewer can read most DOS-based or Windows-based
word processors as well as the Hyper Text Markup Language file
formats used on the Internet's World Wide Web. The not-so-good old
days of being forced to first enter the word processor just to read
two lines of a file to determine what it is are gone, thanks to the
quick single keystroke used in Talking Directory 2.0. Viewing is
far more interactive with this program as well. It allows you to
create notes about the file you're reading. That's extremely handy
if you're reading a manual for the first time and simply want to
take notes on the manual that can later be brailled or just reread.
You can set up bookmarks for the files you're viewing as well. A
simple tap of the semicolon puts you at the point of the bookmark
no matter where you may be in the file-reading process.
I'm not a big fan of software reviews that include a seemingly
endless series of keystrokes and tell what they do. That's what
the manual's for. Suffice it to say that this program is feature-
fat and keystroke-lean. Perhaps one of Mazrui's biggest selling
points with this program is its speed and ease of use. You can
delete whole directories including their files with one keystroke.
Of course, the program asks you whether you really want to do that
before it executes the command, but the sheer convenience of being
able to do that quickly makes this program worth the money.
Talking Directory 2.0 has much to offer in terms of searching
flexibility as well. You can find words in files, search for files
using a variety of patterns DOS alone would never permit. I did
some serious file searching using a 486 DX machine running at 33
mHz and never found the searching to be inordinately slow. You can
also create notes or descriptors about the files within your
directories and have the program search for something using those
descriptions you've created.
In addition to being able to date- and time-stamp files, you
can use the built-in calculator. It has the ability to translate
those letters you hear on TV which are associated with telephone
numbers back into numbers. Let's assume your transit company's
phone number is 217-RIDE. You can simply type in RIDE when the
calculator feature is enabled, and you'll hear Talking Directory
say "7433." If the calculator isn't enough, the program also
offers a kind of perpetual calendar. With the right keystrokes,
you can figure out the day of the week of a holiday several years
or months into the future or past. You can also use the financial
calculator should you need to do so. The built-in calculator is
surprisingly flexible and the calendar is useful in terms of
helping you determine on what day an event will occur.
If you already own and use Talking Directory, you can upgrade
to version 2.0 for $20. Version 2.0 lets you use the tab and
shift-tab keys to jump between directories, files, and paragraphs
in the view mode. It runs either from the DOS prompt or in a DOS
box in Windows 95. You won't have to worry about any problems with
the year 2000 and your computer. Talking Directory 2.0 handles
dates both in this century and the next.
System Requirements
You need a computer with at least an 80286 processor and DOS
3.3 or later to use this program. The price is $70. That includes
free technical support (you pay for any calls), a cassette
tutorial, and of course, the program, manuals and accessory
utilities needed to make it work.
In short, it can be safely said that Talking Directory 2.0
puts a lot of dazzle back in DOS. Indeed, for those who aren't yet
ready to make the switch to a Windows-based operating system,
Talking Directory 2.0 may be just the thing you need to prolong the
life and enhance the usefulness of your version of DOS.
For additional information about this program and others
available, contact Jamal Mazrui, Access Success, 1400 East-West
Highway #427, Silver Spring, MD 20910. Orders outside the United
States should use U.S. currency and add $10 for shipping and
handling. To order by credit card, call Ferguson Enterprises at
(605) 546-2366, fax to (605) 546-2212, or e-mail
[log in to unmask]
A trial version of the software is also available. It is
identical to the commercial version except that it produces
registration reminders at set intervals.
CAPTION
Jamal Mazrui answers a question about graphical user interface
access at the 1996 convention in Tulsa.
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