|
someWHAT - Free Demo Form of WHAT |
WHAT, Wolfberg's Helpful Anagramming Tool, is really a toolbox of integrated powerful tools, with many facilities. In order for you to appreciate this program, a restricted form of it is available to you. The main restriction is with the available lexicons for use in the WHAT workspace. Words of length longer than 6 are only those with a Q. This restriction for lexicons does not apply to WHAT's support for challenge adjudications. You can use someWHAT to adjudicate challenges for any full lexicon, such as OWL2. This was not supported in Version 1.0 (prior to 6-Jul-06).
A few of the program's features are disabled, but you are otherwise able to use the vast majority of its features. Here is the small list of what you cannot do: use lexicons in the workspace other than the few demo lexicons, check for updates via a menu pick, execute commands from a file, import command history, and import wordlists.
Because of this last restriction, the demo version comes with one built-in word list (wordlist 7) with alphagrams of the most likely 7-letter bingos containing a Q. You can use this as the basis of trying out the flashcarding facilities of WHAT. See the document WHAT Flashcarding for details.
We hope you will discover how useful this program is and purchase it, but the demo form has no expiration date. For details about what is included in a purchase, see the Purchasing WHAT page.
WHAT is initially available to run on PC computers running MS/Windows®. We expect it will work with most current versions including W95, W98, NT, W2K, and XP. We believe it will not work with MS/Windows® Millennium Edition (ME). We have not established a minimum processor speed or memory size.
The complete someWHAT installation, including documentation and both TWL98 and OWL2 definitions files occupies about 13 Mb. When you purchase the fully-functional form of the program, if you delete the demo lexicons and replace them with the complete ones, the WHAT installation ocupies around 12 Mb.
The minimum screen size recommended to use this program is 1024 x 768 pixels, since the intended minimum size of the WHAT window is 918 x 686 pixels. If your screen has fewer pixels, some of the WHAT window will be off-screen. You may choose to run WHAT without its showing the left tabs. These are not required for most uses of the program, but they are helpful when formulating esoteric queries. If you are comfortable, turning off the left tabs, you can use WHAT with a minimum screen size of 800 x 575. If you run WHAT on a screen with a pixel density of less than 801 x 601, it will turn off showing the left tabs. According to the pixel density and window size, you may want to adjust the size of the font in the workspace. If you want specific instructions on how to alter the screen size on your computer, click here.
We have no current plans to port the program to a MAC platform, but perhaps this can be done someday.
WHAT comes with these lexicons at the present time:
someWHAT comes with these lexicons at the present time:
WHAT can provide definitions in its output and in a Definitions window, and the product comes with such files for OWL2 definitions and for TWL98 definitions. You can also separately download either of these files whether or not you are a WHAT customer. The size of each of them is about 1 Mb. The WHAT User Guide specifies the format of a definitions file, and you are welcome to provide one for the program to use.
Although these definitions files are included in both WHAT and someWHAT distributions, they are included only for convenience. They are not part of what you purchase when you get the WHAT distribution. You can also get copies of these definitions file from this web site using these links:
These definitions files are executable, self-extracting ZIP files. After downloading, perhaps to your desktop, double-click the file icon to expand the compressed version into the file OWLdefs.txt or TWLdefs.txt. You will be prompted where to place that file; it should go into the directory where your WHAT executable (what.exe) is. This is probably C:\Program Files\WHAT, the default choice set up for you. Once the expanded file has been placed, you no longer need to keep OWLdefs.exe or TWLdefs.exe.
Although WHAT supports multiple lexicons, it deals with only one definitions file, and the setting up to use that definitions file is done as the program starts up.
The file you are about to download is a self-extracting ZIP file of about 8 Mb.with a file extension of .exe. Your browser may warn you about the safety of downloading .exe files, and you have to trust this is alright. Place the file on your desktop or in some directory of your choosing.
Once the download is complete, double-click the icon of the file
to perform the extraction. You need not have
ZIP file extraction software on your computer to do this.
The complete distribution file will be extracted to directory
After doing the extraction, run the setup program by double-clicking the someWHAT.msi icon in the someWHAT_distYYMMDD directory, and the installation will take place.
If you are using Windows XP, you may run into a snag at this point. You may be told your system is not suitable for running MSDOS and MS Windows applications. If you see this error, you should read about how to fix the problem at: http://www.worldstart.com/tips/tips.php/1453
BEWARE - If you have already installed WHAT on your computer in the past and there are still previously-installed WHAT files where you plan to install this distribution, the installation will not overwrite any existing files!
After the installation, you can delete both the downloaded distribution file and directory someWHAT_distYYMMDD which was created when you unzipped it.
As described above the distribution you have purchased does not include definitions, but you can find and download a definitions file from elsewhere on the web. We encourage you to do this.
You can make effective use of WHAT right away by using just a few of its features, and the document "WHAT's First - Getting Started Using WHAT" introduces these features. If you prefer to use a much shorter document, see the one-page blurb "WHAT Common Queries Reference Sheet"; it can indeed fit on one sheet of paper if you print the MS Word form of this blurb, what_common_queries.doc.
Single-click this link to perform the download:
If you already installed someWHAT on your computer,
it probably did not include support for OWL2, and so we recommend you start
all over by getting rid of your old WHAT directory and click the above link to get the current distribution.
You can menu pick
| back to the top of this page | This page, maintained by Mike Wolfberg, was last updated on November 05, 2013. |