From: bruce@zuhause.MN.ORG (Bruce Albrecht)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re:  More Amiga OS weaknesses and strengths
Distribution: world
Date: 7 Jan 93 22:04:57 CST
Organization: Society to Stamp Out Bogus Organizations

In article <C0F5z7.A7A@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>>You can temporarily move icons around on WB, without the OS forcing that
>>position permanently, as does the mac.  Same with windows and window
>>dimensions.
>
>   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.  

And there are lots of people that complain because someone else used their
machine and moved all the icons to different places.  There are times when
either one would be nice.
>
>>Amigas have always had some kind of depth arrangement capability on
>>their windows... unlike the Mac which forces that brain-dead "click on
>>it and it obscures everything else" approach.  (I can even get my Amiga
>>to work that way, if I want... try getting the Mac to be as versatile).
>
>   I don't know what you mean.  I've never had any problems with the way
>windows are arranged and manipulated on the Mac.

Oh, really.  You must be obtuse.  If the bottom window gets clicked to make it active, it instantly obscures the windows above it.  If you want the
screens above it to stay visible, you've got to move them all over the place.
With the Amiga, the windows don't jump to the front unless you tell them
to.  A major plus for the Amiga, IMHO.
>>I've often wished the mac had a "delete" menu item on the desktop.
>>I detest having to find the trashcan after I've covered it up with
>>windows.
>
>   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.

You can always use the trashcan Icon on each disk, but it's less convenient
than having the single Mac trashcan.  I suppose one could write a tool to
examine each disk's trashcan and delete everything from them.
>>The Amiga has always had a shell of some kind... the Mac?  nada.
>
>   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?
>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.

How many Mac users use MPW?  I know of one, and he's a programmer for Apple.
I'd say the percentage is pretty low, probably less than 1%.
>
>   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.

A few years ago, someone wrote a Workbench replacement that multi-tasked.
Unfortunately, CBM hasn't made theirs multi-tasking, yet.  I haven't used
a Mac for about 6 months, but it seems to me that when the Mac busy pointer
was up, the mouse events weren't buffered either.
>
>>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!!!).  I LOVE
>>the way I'm always able to go do something else on my Amiga... even
>>fix the problem the dialog is compaining about so I can click "Retry".
>>Oh, yeah, the Mac dialogs don't give a retry button, now do they?
>
>   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.

Maybe so, but it really makes the Mac unusable.  Out of disk space, too
bad, now all your work is gone.
>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.

Maybe your disk drive is needs adjustment.  I rarely, if ever have this
problem.
>   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.

That's because Mac programs put all the configuration details into a resource fork.  It's easier to edit a config file with one's favorite text editor
than to use ResEdit to change a bunch of strings.
--
bruce@zuhause.mn.org
Youth is wasted on the young.