We've heard of a few weird bugs with WriteNow after our generally glowing review of the program some months back. John Tynes reports that WriteNow often hangs and crashes when you frequently use the shift-arrow key combination to select text. Apparently the screen begins to flash, with shafts of black and white scrolling across your document. It does this for five to fifteen minutes, at the end of which you return to your document either without any problems or with a crash, the latter being more frequent under 3.0. T/Maker knows about the bug, according to John, but has been unable to fix it (or has assigned it a low priority due to the relative paucity of users who select text with shift-arrows).

David Voth has a more general problem, claiming that WriteNow crashes frequently on slower Macs like the Plus, Classic, and SE. He too said that T/Maker had confirmed that they knew about the bug but didn't plan to fix it in the immediate future. David considers this a shame since WriteNow is a great word processor for slower Macs. T/Maker didn't respond to our queries about these problems.

Finally, Tad Davis offers, "There is an easy workaround for the problem of starting headers on the second page in WriteNow. At the very beginning of the document, create a blank header, followed immediately by the header you want to start on the second page. It works perfectly from that point on because WriteNow, according to the manual, always prints the first header defined on a page at the top of that page. Once the blank header gets printed, the second one takes over. You don't have to worry about finding page 2 and hoping it doesn't shift around as you revise."

Information from:
John Tynes, Pagan Publishing -- UC521832@mizzou1.missouri.edu
David Voth -- hvoth@cln.etc.bc.ca
Tad Davis -- davist@a1.relay.upenn.edu