From: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: More Amiga OS weaknesses and strengths
Date: 6 Jan 93 19:40:20 GMT
Reply-To: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett)
Organization: BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED

In article <C0F5z7.A7A@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>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.

	Oh, right.  You mentioned maybe 12 problems (though it took you
several hundred lines to do it).  That's more like a 6:1 ratio, IF we
happen to agree that your "problems" are really problems.

>>Of course, there's ARexx, the like of which has been drooled for for
>>a long time on the mac.

>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 strange.  There are over *250* programs that support ARexx
right now.  Virtually all the major apps support it.  Over 100 of these
ARexx-supporting programs are freely distributable.  What programs are you
running, anyway??  BTW, non-ARexx-supporting programs can still be
controlled by ARexx using "Scripit" from Fish Disk 288.  (I haven't tried
this.)

	No wonder you think Amiga word processors and other apps are "bad."
You haven't extended them with ARexx!  My text editor collaborates with TeX,
ISpell, my compiler, the AutoDocs, and other tools; can pipe any region of
text through any shell command, replacing the region with the results; and
many other tasks, all through ARexx.

	Note:  Anybody who would like a list of all known (to me)
ARexx-supporting programs can find "The ARexx Application List" posted
quarterly in comp.sys.amiga.applications.  It has a long expiration date, so
a copy should always be available on your site.  It is also available for
ftp from the Aminet sites, or by e-mail from me.  I maintain this freely
distributable list for fun, not for profit.

>Screen-dragging is a cute hack that has no real uses.

	Screen-dragging lets you see what's happening on multiple screens
simultaneously.  This is very useful when your editor, financial program, and
calculator all need to be used simultaneously (one realistic example that I
used yesterday).

>>The Amiga has always had a shell of some kind... the Mac?  nada.

>Check out the Macintosh Programmer's workbench.  Does the Amiga shell have
>any GUI aspects?  Does the Amiga shell even have any menus?

	If you are going to bring up 3rd-party products continually, so can
we. :-) Check out WShell 2.0 and Snap.  You get menus, scrollbars, automatic
shell title and prompt changing, clipboard support, filename completion, and
unlimited cut and paste.  And of course, WShell and Snap both have ARexx
ports, so you can add further features transparently to the shell.

>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.

	The Amiga *DOES* have buffering of mouse events and any other
events.  If you have ever written an Amiga program, you would know this.
Events are queued by Intuition.  Your qualm is with Workbench.

>>Not to mention modal dialogs...  the mac makes real sure you get the
>>message (won't let you do anything else till you close it!!!).

>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.

	Ye gods.  If "freezing the entire screen until the user is forced to
click a button" is not a surface aspect, I don't know what is.

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

	This has happened to me maybe twice in 2000 floppy disks.  I suggest
getting your floppy drive checked out.

>| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
>"No, I just think that a computer grafted on top of another computer
>is a kludge.  It has nothing to do with the AGA chipset." -- me

	Why does Marc quote *himself* in his own sig?  Is it because
nobody else says anything that agrees with him? :-)

                                                        Dan
							(no relation)

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| Dan Barrett -- Dept of Computer Science, Lederle Graduate Research Center |
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