Thanks for the wonderful news that MORE will still live on and can be distributed!
I have been responsible for localizing three different versions of MORE in German: 2, 3.0 and 3.1
I also have written different demonstration and tutorial files for the German versions.
My question: Is it possible to make the German version available on your ftp site? Perhaps I have still the installer of 3.1 on some old harddisk.

MORE is still my favorite. I have in 1996 written a scientific book about "Hypermedia Learning Systems" (1st ed Addison-Wesley: Bonn, Paris 1996; 2nd ed Oldenbourg: Munich 1997) of 500 ages totally in MORE within 3 quarters of a year. I could have never done it with any other program in such a short time, especially since it contains references to and quaotations from more than 1.500 other titles. It was quick and easy finding a certain chapter, a subchapter, inserting a new quotation or a comment, closing it and jumping to another chapter.

All my other essays and lecture I wrote in MORE, at least the first draft. The finishing touch had to be done in a program which the publishing house wanted, of course. But the real work, brainstorming, collecting ideas, collecting material, references etc. was done in MORE.
One should say that outliners are not always good outliners: The touch and feel of MORE is special, quick, swift, extremely clear and straightforward. Other outliners however are slick, sticky intransparent, for instance those in the Microsoft products.

Prof. Dr. Rolf Schulmeister
University of Hamburg

>The touch and feel of MORE is special, quick, swift...
>Other outliners however are slick, sticky intransparent...

There was something special about how we used to talk about how MORE "felt," and everybody on the team paid attention to it. I remember Doug paying lots of attention to that in the outliner. It's hard to tune software to feel "just right" (the Goldilocks stage of development). It's especially hard to make the software feel consistent on a wide range of systems: to have the UI feel right even on the slower target machines, while still taking advantage of the performance potential at the high end.

A bit of "feeling software" trivia: the procedure that makes the little "tink" noise when some limit is reached in MORE, such as hitting the down arrow when there's nowhere to go, was called "ouch." It sounded better back then, in my opinion. The same sound played through the new sound manager seems to last longer.

Software in general felt different back then, and not enough attention is paid to that area these days. Way too much attention is paid to how the "chrome" or "skin" looks; that says more about what sells than how good the software is. It's valuable to look back and see what software lasts the longest, and why...

--Brad