Performance Support Features

The Notebook

You can choose to put a terminal emulation’s screen in the Rumba Notebook or run it as a single application. With the tabbed Rumba Notebook, you can also place other related applications in the notebook. For example, a user could click on a tab to switch to a different terminal emulation session or to a Windows application, like the Excel spreadsheet program. You can also add a page to display a multimedia presentation, such as a PowerPoint presentation.

HotSpots

With Rumba you can add a hotspot to a word or set of characters on a terminal emulation screen. You simply dragging the mouse pointer over the word and select add a hotsport from a pop-up menu. The hotspot looks like a windows button. You must then attach a macro to the hotspot. As you move between screens, Rumba checks the text in the screen to find a match for your hotspots. This means you must be careful about adding a hotspot to a word that could appear on several different screens.

Menus

Rumba allows you to easily remove menu options from the terminal emulation window. This can be very useful where you want to limit the options that will be available to an end user. It can help to make the program appear to me much less complex.

Button Bar

You can remove buttons from the default button bar or add buttons that will run user defined macros or other windows applications.

Bookmarks

By adding a bookmark to the most frequently used applications screens, you can quickly jump between screens. Rumba adds the bookmark tags to the right edge of the terminal emulation screen. The name of each bookmark is displayed in a balloon when you move the mouse pointer over a marker.

Macros

With Rumba, you can add macros by clicking on buttons and adding data to a dialog box. You can also use the macro recorder. The macro language is fairly basic but it will allow you to launch other programs, display messages and prompt for information.

You could use the "Run Application" macro to link a help topic to a hotspot on a screen or a button on the button bar. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use Borland Delphi and the ThtmlViewer component to create a simple but very fast off-line HTML browser program. You can then add macros that start the custom browser and displays a HTML file that contains the help information you want to display with the selected hotspot or button.

Quick Assist

The Quick Assist feature can be very helpful where a user frequently re-enters standard information in a data entry screen. You can use this feature to create a template of the standard information that may be added to a field or all the fields on a screen. When the user types the first few characters of a text string, Rumba will insert the complete information into the current field or screen. In one case study, the Redmond Group found that this feature increased data entry rates by 112%.

ActiveX Components

Rumba Office consists of a set of ActiveX components that can also be used with a development program, like Visual Basic, to create a GUI interface for part or all of your character-based application. This option could be very useful where you have a larger number of people who infrequently enter or retrieve a limited range of information.

Assessment

Rumba Office is a very extensive program with many features. You can tweak these features to provide some substantial performance support features, but none of these features will match the power of Rumba Assist.