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 h