From: bloc1469@ee.ee.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: More Amiga OS weaknesses and strengths
Date: 6 Jan 1993 07:47:14 GMT
Organization: Electrical Engineering Dept. University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.89.2.33

In article <C0F5z7.A7A@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>   BTW, this is the first mention of a problem with the surface features of
>the Mac OS that I've seen mentioned after wading through 100 messages.  I
>rattled off numerous problems with the Amiga OS right off the tomp of my head
>with no difficulties, but people had to dig to find something wrong with the
>Mac OS in this respect.  (BTW, this is not without fixes.  Several freely
>distributable programs will fix this completely)

Actually, let me insist that you're wrong.  When deeply-buried
problems become all-pervasive and show up on the surface problem, one
should categorize them in BOTH, not just as a buried problem.
Therefore, while many of the problems with the MacOS that people have
mentioned are at the core of the internal workings of the MacOS, they
ARE ALSO surface problems.

>   I've been using 2.0 for a LONG time (since right after it became available),
>and I noticed that feature only just now.  Shows how often I use it.

Perhaps it's because you're always trying so hard to use your Amiga
like a Mac that you're not trying to examine the capabilities given
you by the system you're using?  Perhaps you're playing the conformist
to such a degree that you don't pay attention to features that don't
exist in some way on the Mac?

>   I agree, the Mac 'cleanup' facility has problems.  It also does not take
>into consideration the space for file names.  Score another one.  Still have
>a ratio of about 50:1 of Amiga GUI problems to Mac GUI problems, though.

That's an awfully big ratio, don't you think?  Maybe 5:1, but not 50.
Again, you insist on classifying internal problems that are visible on
the surface as nothing more than internal problems.

>   Automatic snapshotting is something I wish the Amiga had.  I hate having
>to select 'snapshot' EVERY time I arrange the icons in a window, to save
>the arrangement.  

I'm happy I _DON'T_.  I don't always LIKE having everything
"snapshotted".  As a matter of fact, there are a lot of directories I
just have everything unsnapshotted in just because it's so much
faster, so much less headache.

>   I don't know what you mean.  I've never had any problems with the way
>windows are arranged and manipulated on the Mac.

You're actually one of the few, then, that's something a lot of
people, even mac advocates, complain about.

>   Have you tried loading an icon larger than 80x40 into IconEdit?  The icon
>gets truncated.  Commodore is trying to enforce size limits, too.  Good idea,
>because the Amiga's rather large icons are the reasons that things like 
>automatic feedback during drag&drop can't work very well.  

Agreed.  And yes, it's important that there be a limit on icon sizes.

>   At least the Mac has a trashcan.  When you delete an item on the Amiga,
>it's gone forever.  You don't have a second chance to retrieve it.

Sure I do.  I simply don't select "Empty Trashcan".  Duh.  There's the
minor point that trashcans exist on each volume, yes, I know.  That
DOESN'T, however, mean they don't exist.

>   And something that I've, to date, never used.  I was really excited about
>it when Commodore announced that ARexx was going to be standard with 2.0.
>Then I found that I could not find any uses for it, mostly because none of the
>programs that I want to write ARexx scripts for support ARexx.

That's surprising.  If I wanted to write arexx scripts for an app and
the app didn't support it, I'd do one of three things:

1) get the source and add arexx support,
2) get another app,
or 3) write my own.

>   Screen-dragging is a cute hack that has no real uses.  Multiple screens
>that can be swapped is far more useful, and the Mac has a software
>approximation of this.

A poor and slow approximation, with none of the advantages of multiple
screens on the Amiga, such as not having to actually REMOVE a window
and then draw and refresh the new one.

>   Check out the Macintosh Programmer's workbench.  This is something that
>I wish the Amiga had.  A nice shell with graphical structures.  Does the
>Amiga shell have any GUI aspects?  Does the Amiga shell even have any menus?

Why the HELL should a shell have GUI aspects?  What would you PUT in a
menu?

The MPW stinks pretty bad.  It's a testimony of the single-tasking
nature of the Mac, you can only run one, and you can only do one thing
at a time.  Compile.  wait.  wait.  wait.  No, you can't do that,
you're compiling.  Argh.

Listen.  The whole point of a shell is that it isn't a GUI with lots
of labels.  It's a shell, similar to the shells that have existed on
systems since the dawn of operating systems.

>No to both questions.  The Amiga shell is still heavily entrenched in the
>MS-DOS and CP/M paradigm in this respect.  The programmers at Commodore just
>don't seem to have any idea that a mouse can actually be useful for shell
>operations.

I disagree.  The only use a mouse has in a shell is to clip text.

>   Buffering of mouse events is another thing I wish the Amiga had.  Right
>now, the Amiga's Workbench does NOT multitask very well.  Many operations
>will put the 'busy pointer' up for many seconds, and during this time any
>mouse events are lost.

Umm, it MULTITASKS just fine.  It just doesn't have multiple threads
of execution, and that's different.

>   Both of these are carry-overs from the Mac's lack of real multitasking,
>which in turn is a problem with the internals and not the surface aspects.

And because they carry over to the surface, they become both internal
and surface problems.  They have a dual nature in that respect, it's
unavoidable.  To classify it as an internal problem would be
inaccurate.  It's more.  It's both.

>   This feature is more necessary on the Amiga than on the Mac.  On the
>Amiga, icons (even the system default icons, viewed on a 724x482 screen)
>tend to be HUGE.  This necessitates giving the user a way to snapshot the
>volume icons.  On the Mac, the icons are small enough that the default 
>positions are never a problem.

Not true.  How's this for a mac flaw:  It says it follows a
standardized paradigm for its GUI, and yet it allows you to snapshot
some icons and not others.

>   Another little problem with the internals peeking through to the surface.

Right.  It's both an internal and external problem then.

>BTW, Amia format operations seem to take forever and a day, and don't seem
>to have very good error-checking during the format.  I don't know how many
>times I've formatted a disk on an Amiga, only to have write errors to the
>disk not much later.  the Mac seems to have better verification of disks
>during the format.

Well, that's appearances.  It could be do to the GCR format, though.

>   Well, at least the user CAN muck with a program's resources.  Amiga programs
>have things similar to resources, but there is nothing available for the
>Amiga to allow a person to change these aspects of Amiga executable files.

Amiga programs have things similar to resources?  That's news.  Tell
me about them.

Greg


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