GEOS Applications

Official Berkeley Softworks Offerings

Here is a list of applications from Berkeley Softworks (BSW):

geoPaint

The first of the two "killer apps" that came bundled with GEOS, geoPaint is a high-resolution drawing program heavily inspired by MacPaint. Unlike other C64 drawing programs that operate on the C64's 320x192 high-resolution screen, geoPaint lets you work on a full-sized US Letter document (8.5"x11"). If you use the navigation tool, you can see that the visible work area represents around 10% of the total document size.

geoPaint can be used to put the finishing touches on a geoWrite document that has been transformed with one of the special printer drivers generated by the Paint Drivers application.

geoWrite

The second killer app, geoWrite, introduced Commodore users to the modern desktop publishing convention of "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG). I cannot overstate what a revolutionary change it was to go from monospaced dot-matrix printing to this modern approach with proportional fonts, text styling, and immediate visual feedback.

geoWrite's visible work area is only four inches wide, so typing out a full-width document causes the display to flip back and forth between the two halves of the page, a process which is both distracting and annoyingly slow. GEOS users quickly learned to eliminate screen flipping by setting narrow margins before starting to write. After all the text is entered, the margins can be readjusted to use the full width of the page.

When managing your work disks, pay attention to your fonts. If your font files are not on the same disk as your document, geoWrite will revert to displaying your document in the system font, 9-point BSW.

geoSpell

geoSpell is a standalone application that spell-checks geoWrite documents. To run a check, your work disk must contain the geoSpell application, the document you want to check, the GeoDictionary data file, and an optional "personal" dictionary.

The spell-check process is slow: geoSpell takes 15 seconds to launch from a 1581, and a further 70 seconds are required to check a 200-word document. Using the RAM disk as your work disk reduces the overall run time to about 45 seconds, which is still slow. It's not practical to run continuous spell checks as you work; you'll want to wait until your document is complete before running the spell check.

geoSpell flags words it doesn't recognize but the dictionary is incomplete. It couldn't find a match for "marches" although it did know "march" and "marching". geoSpell doesn't offer suggestions, but it does provide a search tool so you can see what's in its dictionary. If a word is not found, the user is responsible for looking up the correct spelling in a physical dictionary.

I used to keep a personal dictionary of musical terms (typically Italian words that would not be in the base dictionary), and another of composer's names (because I could never quite seem to get "Tchaikovsky" right). It's a good idea to keep separate dictionaries for different topics, because if your personal dictionary gets too large, it can significantly slow down the spell-check process.