Have you ever wanted to spell check your BlitzMail messages? How about having an automatic signature -- with your personal address and phone number -- attached to every message you send?
The new Windows version of the BlitzMail program, BlitzMail 2.6 released in mid-June, allows you to do these things and more.
Developed by Doug Hornig, senior programming analyst at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the new BlitzMail program is multithreaded, allowing users to multi-task some functions like downloading a big file and composing a message at the same time.
The visual faade is also somewhat different from the previous PC version; the screen has some convenient icons to forward, compose or print a message, placed at the bottom of the screen.
According to Horning, the product, which successfully passed a pre-launch Beta testing, has been working "remarkably well" so far. He said DHMC plans to release a slightly updated version later in the summer.
"It runs more efficiently [than the previous version] under the Windows environment and is a much more refined product," Bill Brawley, spokesman for Computing Services at Dartmouth, said of the new revision.
Jim Mathews, chief programmer at computing services, could not be reached for comment last week on whether Dartmouth plans to release a new Macintosh version of BlitzMail with spell check, signatures and other similar features to the PC version.
Horning said he decided a year-and-a-half ago to rewrite the Windows BlitzMail program -- which was originally developed in the Neuron data language -- in his spare time from scratch in a new programming language.
Somewhere along the line the project was officially picked up by the Medical Center -- now the new version is also available on the Dartmouth website for free downloading.
"The signature is a very popular thing," Hornig said of the product's features. "The spell-check is another thing people notice most besides the icons."
According to Hornig, about 1,000 people downloaded the new version on the day of its release and the product currently has about 2,700 users.
Hornig said he wants to continue working on the new version; his future plans include allowing messages to display HTML, rich text and pictures.
Describing his work as a "big project," Hornig said, "writing something as full featured as a BlitzMail client takes years."
The Medical Center, which made a major switch from Macintosh machines to Windows approximately four years ago, were the first ones to develop the BlitzMail version for PCs and have been updating it ever since.
