DFA has been developed for several years. While it has been a tiny tool, which the programmer just did for himself in the very beginning, this has significantly changed during the program's evolution. Many DFA users participated in the development of DFA: They made suggestions how to improve DFA, wrote Arexx scripts, translated locale files etc.

The following lines may give you an idea of what DFA is today:

Support of OS2.x/3.x
Support of native languages
Beautiful and comfortable user interface
Extensive opportunities to customize DFA
Powerful Arexx interface
Complete Documentation
Carefully programmed application for optimal efficiency
Special features


Support of OS2.x/3.x

  • Commodity support, i.e. DFA can be reached by hotkey or the Exchange utility of the Workbench
  • The DFA main window is an application window; you may drag and drop address database files on it to load them
  • Application icon and application menu
  • DFA can be used as default tool for address database files


Support of native languages

  • At least Amiga OS2.1 is needed to use this feature
  • Supported languages are english (builtin), german, french and italian.
  • The french and italian locale files can be downloaded seperately from the Supplements page.


Beautiful and comfortable user interface

  • The complete distribution comes along with MagicWB icons, some of them were especially created for DFA by the MagicWB author Martin Huttenloher himself
  • Toolbar with MagicWB style buttons to access the most often used functions
  • All windows of DFA are font sensitive
  • The DFA-Editor main window is font sensitive and resizable
  • All operations of DFA are accessable by keyboard


Extensive opportunities to customize DFA

  • The format of the address listview and the display part of the main window of the DFA-Editor main window can be changed
  • Addresses can be sorted by any (text) field of the address
  • The fonts for the DFA-Editor and the DFA-Preferences can be changed
  • You may configure a custom screen for DFA


Powerful Arexx interface

  • The Arexx interface supplies 40 commands and more than 100 options.
  • The Arexx port is available as soon as the DFA server is running. You do not need to run the DFA editor to use Arexx!


Complete Documentation

  • Online help is available out of (nearly) every window of DFA
  • The complete documentation is available in german and english; a french version can be downloaded here.
  • The distribution contains the documention in Amigaguide and TeX format. ASCII and Postscript formatted documentation can be downloaded from this server.


Carefully programmed application for optimal efficiency

  • The program has been split into the editor, the server and the preferences parts; by this the available memory is optimally used and DFA often needs even less memory than it did in version 1.2x
  • Program code used by more than one part of DFA have been exported into a shared library, the dfa.library
  • The internal memory management has been rewritten from scratch for DFA 2.x with the consequence that the address data now uses much less RAM than it did in version 1.x
  • Usage of memory pools decreases memory fragmentation and speeds up memory allocation and deallocation
  • Routines for loading and saving addresses have been optimized for speed. This means that DFA saves up to 1000 addresses a second (depending on the hardware configuration).


Special features

  • Support of external files
  • Powerful dial function
  • Addresses can be separated into groups
  • Network support



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Copyright 1996, SASG HomeHelpFeedbackOrderAbout Updated: 7-Sep-96