From: barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett)
Subject: More Amiga OS weaknesses and strengths
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 19:06:58 GMT

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
is riddled with defects.  Take drag-and-drop, for instance.  This feature is
totally broken on the Amiga.  On the Macintosh, when an icon is dragged and
held over a folder, the destination folder highlights to tell you exactly where
the file will end up when it is released.  This does not happen on the Amiga.
On the Amiga, drag-and-drop operations are done almost completely blind.  There
is absolutely no feedback from the system to tell you exactly where the file
will go when it is released.  You operate on faith and hope alone.  BTW, this
lack of feedback from the system is in violation of Commodore's own 
Style Guide.

   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.  
   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.
   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.
   
   Commodore USED to have something called NotePad that could have eventually
been expanded to an all-purpose document viewer like TeachText.  But, true to
form, Commodore abandoned it.  I wish Commodore would do two things: come up
with an IFF form for a text file with imbedded ILBM graphics.  Then write an
update for NotePad, minus the editing capabilities, that can view documents
with this IFF form.  An even better solution would be to rewrite the
ASCII-based AmigaGuide so that it supports color graphics in addition to
boring text.  

   That I can so easily come up with a long list of Amiga surface defects 
testifies to how unprofessional the surface features of the AmigaOS really
are.  I really tried making a list of things that could be improved with
the surface features of the MacOS, and could not find more than three or four.
But it seems so easy to whittle off a list of a hundred or so things with 
the surface features of the AmigaOS that are broken or unworkable or badly
in need of improvements.  It should not be so easy to come up with such a
list.

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