More about JS3

[Guest guest]

Dear List -

I thought some of you might like to hear some more of my

impressions of Das' incredible new JS3 release, and those of you who

don't can simply exercise your delete button finger.

 

First of all, (from a user perspective) every jyotish program in the

world is built around one main window supported by sub-windows. JS3

isn't like that at all. It's built around SEVERAL windows that each

function almost like a separate program. The "biggies" are the Chart

Window, The Dashas Window, the QuickView Window, and to some extent

the Printing Window. There are slews of support windows also, the

most important being the Main List Window, but the Chart, Dashas, and

QuickView windows cover almost everything and each have a huge, huge

number of features.

 

The window that's blowing my mind today is the QuickView window. The

name is interesting, because there are so many zillion features on

this window, there's nothing "quick" about it. You can think of it as

basically a mini-jyotish program all by itself. You could probably do

a whole reading -- and a lot more -- with this window alone.

 

There are four main views in this window. They are the chart view,

the transit view, the calendar view, and the lists view. They aren't

really called this, but that's what I call them. Here are two shots

of the chart view.

Attachment: (image/tiff) QuickView 2.tiff [not stored]

Attachment: (image/tiff) QuickView 1.tiff [not stored]

Notice that in the chart view by itself, the bottom area has 5 tabs.

The first shot shows the dasha tab, and the second one the birth data

tab. Each of the four main views has many tabs associated with it

that contain a ton of information or preferences. That's what I mean

about even just this window alone being a powerful jyotish program.

You can enter a chart here, recalculate it, look at the dashas,

everything. See how it's long and skinny? Makes it makes it easy to

tuck all this power away in one corner of your screen while you have

other windows open.

 

The view that sold me on this window, however, is the calendar view.

It's basically an all-powerful panchang program that's tapped into

whatever chart you're interested in at the moment. Here are two views

that say it all:

Attachment: (image/tiff) Calendar 1.tiff [not stored]

Attachment: (image/tiff) Calendar 2.tiff [not stored]

Look at all those tabs. You've got a full panchang, a full lunation

system, ingressions, readings, stations, and more packed into this

little window. You can put this on the side of your screen and do

practically anything -- a reading, a muhurta, panchang stuff, and

even list stuff (in the lists or "catagories" view) with just this

window alone.

 

On the down side, it doesn't have the best chart views -- those are

fully expressed in the chart window -- and some of the features

aren't hooked up yet. I for one could see this little baby getting

tricked out with a couple more views (and maybe a choice for double-

width) and doing most of my work right here.