difference between e-prime and e-prime pro
asiblood
we are considering buying the e-prime program but we want to know the
main difference between the regular and the pro version.
can anyone tell me the main difference, and does it really matter to
pay an extra 200$ for the pro version ?
thank you
David K McFarlane
> we are considering buying the e-prime program but we want to know the
> main difference between the regular and the pro version.
>
> can anyone tell me the main difference, and does it really matter to
> pay an extra 200$ for the pro version ?
You can see PST's own terse description of the differences at
www.pstnet.com/products/e%2Dprime, but you already know that. EP2 Pro
includes extra features such as the ability to change display screens during
an experiment, extra support for external devices (whatever that means), the
ability to write and use your own package files, and Intellisense (pops up a
list of property and method names when typing an object name in Inline
script, IMO a real nuisance but others may like it). None of these sound
like anything we would use, so our first decision was to spare the extra
money and purchase EP2 non-Pro.
But things get trickier if you ever want to collaborate with another lab on
writing an experiment. If you have non-Pro, and your collaborator sends you
an E-Studio (.es2) file that has been saved in the Pro format, then you will
not be able to open it for viewing, editing, or running, even if the
experiment does not use any Pro features. If they send you the
E-Run/E-Basic (.ebs2) file then you can still run the experiment (as long as
it does not use any Pro features), but you still cannot view the code let
alone edit it.
For this reason alone we decided to spend the extra money to get Pro. So
here's my advice to everyone: Spend the extra money to buy Pro. Then,
whenever you start writing a new experiment, make sure to use the non-Pro
template and save the experiment using the non-Pro file format. That will
give you the broadest compatibility between the two editions of EP2. If you
do find that you need some feature from Pro, you can always convert the
experiment to the Pro file format and go from there. At this time once a
.es2 file is saved in the Pro format there is no way to convert it back to
non-Pro, although PST could always provide that capability in a later
revision.
-- David McFarlane, Systems Designer
Dept. Psychology, Michigan State University