From: miked@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Mike Danielsen)
Subject: Re: More Amiga OS weaknesses and strengths
Organization: Motorola, CCR&D, CORP, Schaumburg, IL
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 15:50:26 GMT

In article <C0CFro.MuE@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>In article <1993Jan4.114316.11600@klaava.Helsinki.FI> lindblad@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Jarkko Lindblad) writes:
>>MB is so objective: approximately 2 lines of Amiga OS strenghts, and
>>70 of weaknesses...:)
>
>   I could have had 70 more lines of weaknesses.  On the surface, the AmigaOS

Give me a break. I've used a macIIfx at work for over a year and it's a
real dog compared to my Amiga 2000/030. Sure there's nice things about
Mac's, but there's also lots of horrible stuff wiht the Mac(non)OS. If
you like Mac's so much why don't you go get a Mac nonPerforma.

>   Another feature that is totally broken on the Amiga is launching of 
>applications by double-clicking a project.  On the Macintosh, when you
>double-click a project, the 'creator' application is always found and launched
>and the project is loaded, no matter where the creator application is located
>on the disk.  On the Amiga, tooltypes are almost always hard-coded.  There 
>is almost no flexibility to the way the Amiga does it.       

I hate this on the mac. The mac doesn't have a real file system and
apparently hashes fileID's to find apps. How can you tell an application to
use a specific version of some program on the mac? You can't. If you just
got a new version of a program and don't want to through away the old
version, clicking on the project icon brings up which version???

>   For instance, I recently downloaded a bunch of Christmas SMUS music files
>from an Amiga FTP site.  The files came with a SMUS player, called 'play'.
>I unarchived the files, double-clicked one of the music files, and sure as
>the day the requester "Unable to open your tool 'play'" appreared.  This 
>simply does not happen on the Macintosh.  On the Mac, the system will always
>do its best to locate the application to go with a project.  I can count on 
>one hand the number of times that I have ever double-clicked the icon for a
>text file on the Amiga and had the correct text-file-viewer actually come
>up.  Most of the time, all I get is a requester saying "unable to locate your
>tool 'less'" or something similar.             

If you had several music players on the mac and you wanted to change the
default player, you would have to use resedit and know the 4 letter code
for the music player you wanted. Using information on the Amiga is much
nicer.

>   All of this is fine for expert Amiga users, who can just view files with a
>shell, but all of this gives the Amiga a very steep learning curve for the
>novice user.  For the novice user, this facility for using a project by double-
>clicking it is almost completely broken.  It needs to be replaced with 
>something that actually works.
>
>   The Macintosh also has a nicety called 'TeachText'.  TeachText is a very
>nice document viewer that can use documents with imbedded graphics.  The
>graphics can be color or black-and-white, structured or bitmapped.  This allows
>documentation files for a utility to have in them snapshots of screens from
>the utility, for instance.  Or you could have a doc file for a PostScript or
>TrueType font with a bitmapped picture of the font imbedded in the doc file.
>The possibilities are endless.  On the Amiga, whenever the auther of a utility
>wants to show a menu or screen from the utility, the only thing the person
>can do is attempt to design a VERY crude representation of that screen or menu
>using ASCII graphics in the text file to accompany that utility.  There are
>really no comparisons between text files with crude ASCII representations of
>graphics, and documents with graphics in them.
>
     
TeachText is an awful program. Probably could have been written in half an
hour if programming the mac wasn't so awful. TeachText doesn't read files
bigger than 32k(I think). Anyways I always have problems reading stuff with
TeachText. The text viewers on the Amiga are much nicer.

>
>---
>| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
>--------------------------------------------------

Any computer system can be improved and there are some things on the mac
that I would like to see on the Amiga. There's a lot more that I would
like to see on the mac from the Amiga though.

Here's what I would like to see on the Amiga:

1. mac style cut and paste in my favorite editor, CED.

2. rename integrated into workbench.

3. icon updating on workbench.

That's it. Can't think of anything else. 

For the mac, the best thing would be to trash it. With OS/2 out for PC's,
mac's are now the worst of the three.


Mike Danielsen