by DonHopkins | 2025-06-25 00:12:41+00:00
>> Oracle owns the rights to the NeWS source code so I'm not allowed to post it on my Github page.

>They are certainly not making any money with it right now. All patents should be expired by now. Have you ever sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the code?

Ha ha! Good luck, kiddo. Have you ever tried asking a lawnmower for favors? Do you really think "sincerity" would help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s

>X11 has extensions which correct for most of its original flaws.

Oh, then I guess there's no reason for Wayland, then. Have you broken the news to them? How did they react?

So is there an X-Windows extension yet that lets you download code into the window server where it can execute right next to the hardware and handle input events and draw interactive user interfaces locally without network traffic and context switching, and implement efficient application specific network protocols and rendering pipelines, just like NeWS?

Or, you know, like a web browser running an AJAX app like Google Maps? Certainly not Display PostScript, it can't do that, and nobody uses it any more for some reason or another.

>> Pie Menus

>Great for demos and to collect grant money, i guess. But in principle a total anti-pattern. People read from left to right and from top to bottom. Traditional context menus are therefore far superior, especially for varying numbers of options.

A lot more than grant money: The Sims has made EA $5 billion (as of 2019), putting pie menus into 70 million people's hands, and Blender and many other programs use them too. Have you ever played The Sims or used Blender?

https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/the-sims-25-anniversary/

What's your evidence for that claim that "Traditional context menus are therefore far superior"? Citations, or are you just bullshitting? Thanks to Fitts's Law, which every user interface designer should be familiar with, pie menus are much faster and have a significantly lower error rate than linear menus, so you're simply wrong about traditional menus being "far superior".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

We empirically proved that and published our findings at ACM SIGCHI in 1988, and since then many other people have performed controlled experiments replicating and elaborating our frequently cited results.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

>> Weirdly dragable tabs

>Not impressed at all, sorry. Creates much more visual confusion than generic title bars.

Have you ever used a web browser? I'm guessing you are using one right now! You must be pretty easily confused, so speak for yourself, please don't project your confusion onto others, we're doing just fine being not confused. Is the confusion in the room with you right now? ;)

Maybe you can reduce your confusion by reading the wikipedia article about tabbed windows. That screen dump in the article is an illustration of UniPress Emacs with tabbed windows and the HyperTIES hypermedia browser with pie menus and interactive PostScript "applets" (long before that term was coined for Java applets, or the term "AJAX" was coined for JavaScript web apps), which I developed for NeWS in 1988 or so. No coincidentally, James Gosling developed UniPress Emacs, NeWS, and Java.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483721

DonHopkins on April 12, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: NeWS – Network Extensible Window System

NeWS was not actually Adobe's Display PostScript, but it was Sun's independent implementation and specialized dialect of PostScript, supporting light weight processes, overlapping arbitrarily shaped canvases, window management, event distribution, garbage collection, networking, object oriented programming, etc.

The most important ability that NeWS had, but was missing from Display PostScript and its successors (OS/X Core Graphics, PDF, SVG, canvas API, etc), is the ability to download code to create an efficient custom high level application specific protocol between the client and server.

That essential ability is what people call "AJAX" these days, now that PostScript has been supplanted by JavaScript and a whole bunch of different APIs, and now we're even downloading shaders to the GPU! Truly exciting!

James Gosling chose PostScript from the start, for how its network programming ability dovetails with its graphics and data representation, instead of nailing it onto the side of a bunch of different technologies as an afterthought.

To quote the comparison from the wikipedia article:

NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:

1) used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

2) used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

3) used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.