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March 1999 -- AviMate 2
We made AviMate 2 available for
download at avimate.com in mid-January, 1998. Most web visitors were
able to successfully download and install AviMate 2. A few, however,
did encounter download or installation problems which we immediately
attacked.
To solve the download problems, we
relocated our files to a more robust FTP site. Since then few have
encountered any difficulty downloading the AviMate trial file.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is known to have a problem handling
large files so if a client still has download problems, we have been
suggesting that they try using a different browser like Netscape or
Internet Explorer 3 or try downloading via an ftp program such as WSFTP.
Our installation problems have not been
as easy to dispel. It has been most frustrating to those clients
affected and ourselves! The fundamental problem stems from a decision
we made to have AviMate 2 backward compatible to Windows 3.1 in order
to accommodate a number of our users who are still using the 3.1
operating system. After much effort, we have resolved the problems by
using InstallShield Professional, the flagship of install software,
and by preparing separate tailored installs for Windows 3.1 and 95
users.
We have also fixed various bugs which
have been uncovered, despite our best efforts to catch them during
Beta testing. Please download our latest update so that you can
take advantage of these fixes.
By the way, based on our above
described installation problems, we have come to the conclusion that
maintaining Windows 3.1 compatibility is getting too impractical. Even
Microsoft is getting cavalier about it! (For example, Microsoft
provided us a fix to one of their Windows 95 bugs for a $95 consulting
fee. It worked great, but subsequent Windows 3.1 users ended up with
an incompatibility problem we had to then fix with separate installs.
Thanks, Microsoft.)
Our next major version upgrade will
definitely be a 32-bit application! We regret any inconvenience to our
Windows 3.1 users, but we have no choice.
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