From: dillon@overload.Berkeley.CA.US (Matthew Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy
Subject: Re:  NeXT's, Amiga's, PC's, MAC'S, (was Re: Question #2 "Are Macintosh Users Really Happy?")
Distribution: world
Date: 14 Aug 92 10:54:12 PST
Organization: Not an Organization

In article <8060@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> murphy@gibbs.physics.purdue.edu (William J. Murphy) writes:
>In article <dillon.0kwu@overload.Berkeley.CA.US> dillon@overload.Berkeley.CA.US
>(Matthew Dillon) writes:
>>    prevailent across the industry but there is a difference.  In the Amiga
>>    market, for example, you have extremely sophisticated freeware written
>>...
>
>I don't agree with your statement about the quality of the freeware software
>in the Amiga.	Two reasons:  1) Much of what I recall collecting while I owned
>an Amiga did not really produce satisfactory results. (I won't include your
>software in this, it worked very well and was a factor in my purchasing an
>Amiga.)  2) The software that I see being released by Fred Fish seems to me
>to be many of the same utility programs reworked by someone else.  That is
>the freeware (GIGABYTES of it) is largely repetitive.
>
>So the real question is how much useful software is there available on either
>platform?

    You really can't appreciate the Fish colletion without getting the CD.
    While there is a lot of repetition (people upgrade and bugfix their
    stuff), there is also a LOT of consumer level stuff.  Since everything
    is in the bag, you get the '2 hour projects' along with the good stuff
    and you do have look around (that's what catalog indexes are for!).

    That's true of any platform.  That the NeXT software doesn't appear to
    be repetative is not a plus... it means that fewer people are writing
    stuff for it and fewer people are upgrading the stuff they write.  I do
    a comprehensive listing of freeware NeXT stuff and quite a bit of the
    stuff is over 2 years old, as well as fiting on a few pages.  I do a
    comprehensive freeware listing of Amiga stuff and I see 30+ new items
    each month with several thousand separate projects over the same time
    period.

>IMO, I don't view the NeXT software as largely repetitive.  As well,
>people are not writing a plethora of utility programs that are largely
>irrelevant to everyday work.  For myself, I don't need to have a process
>monitor running all the time, I don't need 15 different screen based editors
>(vi, Edit, DME, and Z work(ed) just fine).  I would like an AREXX for the NeXT,
>but it's not crucial.  I don't need dnet, NeXT Step provides for most of what

    With a plethora of stuff available I don't need much of it either.  But
    other people will need things that I don't, and vise versa.  Just
    because you don't use DNet doesn't mean that it's unusable... hundreds
    of people use it, even though I wrote it 5+ years ago and don't use it
    myself anymore.  Just because you only use four editors doesn't mean
    that no one uses the remaining half dozen freeware and dozen commercial
    ones out there.

    The point of all of this is that to make a machine into a success you
    need to give the consumer a LOT of choices.  While Lotus Improv may
    work for some people, maybe even me, it's only covering first base, and
    there is no guarentee that they will continue to support it. Indeed, it
    appears they have backed off.

>it's output is 400DPI and no jaggies because of the PostScript.  Lotus Improv
>is far more comprehendable than any spreadsheet that I have used on ANY
>platform.  It may not do everything, but it allows such flexibility in
>organizing data that it is quite usefull.
>...

					    -Matt


>Bill Murphy		   | Old Home Cottage Cheese:  The only cottage
>			  | cheese that's not made from formaldehyde,
>murphy@physics.purdue.edu | arsenic, or rodent parts.

--

    Matthew Dillon	    dillon@Overload.Berkeley.CA.US
    891 Regal Rd.	    uunet.uu.net!overload!dillon
    Berkeley, Ca. 94708     ham: KC6LVW (no mail drop)
    USA

Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy