Thunderbird UI Redux
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@flabdablet said:
@FrostCat said:
Really? I still just paste through Notepad.
Does Outlook do the thing where the soft line breaks Notepad has inserted for word wrapping get pasted as hard line breaks, or is that an IE-only annoyance?
If you mean where pasted text gets double line breaks, stuff pasted from IE does it (sometimes) but not stuff pasted from Notepad, which is why I still paste through Notepad (although since work upgraded us from Office 2003 to 2010, I don't need to do it as much.)
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
@flabdablet said:
Does Outlook do the thing where the soft line breaks Notepad has inserted for word wrapping get pasted as hard line breaks, or is that an IE-only annoyance?
What would it take, do you reckon, to convince Microsoft to actually fix Notepad?
I doubt this is still true today, but at one stage, either IIS 6 or Exchange 2003 (the latter, I think) generated logs with UNIX line endings, that Notepad doesn't recognise.
As of WIndows 7, I am almost positive Notepad is still just a wrapper around a text box, so it'll probably never happen. Then again, there's so darn many better basic editors, it's an easy fix. I'm currently using Notepad++. If I were into paying money I'd probably by UltraEdit.
Eta: Spy++ reports the text area of Notepad is a window with a window class named "Edit", which is the name of the text box window class.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Because the obvious choice of a text editor is a program geared towards writing letters to your aunt. Plain text just means "set font to Courier New".
Uh. Huh? What are you talking about?
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
A proper Notepad would have things like regex find/filter/replace, cycle through files of the same type (Alt-Pg Up/Dn in JujuEdit), on-demand loading for large files (, and (read-only if necessary) hex view mode in case the file turns out to be binary, so you have a go-to program for checking what's in any file.
Congratulations, you're listing several reasons people using Notepad are idiots and should die.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Just tried to open (via Ctrl+O) a 6 GB log file in WordPad (Server 2008 R2):
Why would you do that? Why do you even have a 6 GB log file? Windows already has a logging system, which has absolutely nothing to do with Notepad.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Besides, if Notepad is so bad, why are .txt file still associated with it by default on every system including Server 2008 R2 and Windows 8?
Because .txt is the file type for DOS-style text files, and Notepad exists for DOS compatibility. At least that was the original reason. Now the reason is because a bunch of idiot apps written by morons rely on Notepad being the editor for .txt files. I think I JUST FUCKING WENT OVER THIS A FEW MINUTES AGO.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
No confidence on Microsoft's part in their choice of text editor?
Huh?
Microsoft representatives have stated numerous times that they'd have dropped Notepad like a hot potato years and years ago if they could get away with it. Because of compatibility with idiot apps written by morons, they can't. In fact they actually (at least as of Vista) ship multiple copies of Notepad with the OS, since the idiot apps written by morons use different hard-coded paths to find it.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Filed under: We've had 64-bit integers for a long time now, Right tool for the job, My 1981 8-bit micro had 32-bit integers in BASIC
Your post delivers more "huh?" per-minute than any other post I've seen. Jesus, man. Make sense. MAKE SENSE!
Too lazy to properly thread responses into this, sorry. Yeah, Notepad's really just there so there's some basic functionality. If they put in a more featured app, people would scream "antitrust" faster than you could imagine, so it'll never get upgraded. Like I said, there's a ton of better things.
Blakey, I'm sure you know that lots of apps write their own logs. I use a database in my day job that writes a text log file; in my experience, almost nobody ever trims the log, so it's easy for the logs to be large enough to cause notepad to freeze briefly when opening them.
BTW as of WIndows 7 (I dont' have Vista to check) there are apparently only three copies left of Notepad: one in Windows, one in System32, and one in SysWow64 (the latter is a 32-bit version.)
A dir/s of the Windows directory shows several more copies but I believe that those are actually links, not additional copies. I thought I read on the Old New Thing that one of the first two I listed is a link as well, not an additional copy.
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@blakeyrat said:
Notepad isn't broken. It literally only ever existed for DOS compatibility. (You're supposed to use WordPad for actual work.)
@blakeyrat said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Besides, if Notepad is so bad, why are .txt file still associated with it by default on every system including Server 2008 R2 and Windows 8?
Because .txt is the file type for DOS-style text files, and Notepad exists for DOS compatibility.
What the holy fuck are you on about???
Notepad is for editing plain text, Wordpad is for rich text, i.e. writing letters (Word's little brother). They have no business in common. Are you seriously suggesting using Wordpad as a text editor??
Granted, everybody installs their favorite real text editor after installation. But Notepad is what comes out of the box, and Wordpad is not a replacement for it.And what do .txt files have to do with DOS compatibility?? They are simply plain text files. Notepad doesn't even use the same codepage as DOS did or cmd.exe does. Try this:
C:>echo "äöüßéèêáàâíìî" > test.txt ; notepad test.txt
And check if it comes out the same.
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Aw, there I thought "äöüßéèêáàâíìî" would come out as something like "Hello stranger" in Russian when opened in Notepad :)
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One can answer the question of "why is notepad crap" pretty easily.
Imagine if Notepad had all those features. Where would other Text Editor Vendors go? You might think "well, back to the drawing board to make incremental improvements to their own editors". And some will. But how many will drop everything and start screaming anti-trust?
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@topspin said:
Are you seriously suggesting using Wordpad as a text editor??
No. I'm just suggesting that anybody using Notepad as a text editor is an idiot and should die.
@topspin said:
But Notepad is what comes out of the box, and Wordpad is not a replacement for it.
I don't deny that Notepad comes out of the box. I'm just saying it shouldn't be used by anybody for any purpose.
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@blakeyrat said:
No. I'm just suggesting that anybody using Notepad as a text editor is an idiot and should die.
There's a fair old whiff of "no true Scotsman" around the phrase "Notepad as a text editor".
If you're talking about people with some kind of emotional commitment to Notepad who persistently find the error on line 377 by pressing the down-arrow key exactly 376 times and flat refuse to learn something more capable, then sure, I'm inclined to agree with you. But there are lots of simple text editing and viewing tasks for which Notepad is really all you need. I'm quite glad it's Just There on every Winbox I ever touch and would miss it if it were gone.
It's actually quite a useful little log file reader in a lot of cases, precisely because it uses a simple-minded load-it-all-into-RAM strategy. Of course it's no use for log files bigger than a few meg, but Wordpad and other tools that work similarly have their own gotchas: windowing a file rather than just reading it all in usually fails for files held open by their generating apps.
And don't get me started on the utter and complete inadequacy of the native Windows event logging subsystem, its shitarse and hopelessly slow UI, or the fact that nothing useful ever gets logged with it. At least not until you can show me some other way to find out exactly what's gone wrong with today's failed MSI installation by any method not involving opening a .log file with a text viewer.
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@topspin said:
BTW, what happened to your random tag script?
I switched from Linux back to Windows and never bothered to set it up again. Or change my forum signature.
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@MiffTheFox said:
what's wrong with the gmail web interface?
The web interface.
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@El_Heffe said:
@MiffTheFox said:
what's wrong with the gmail web interface?
The web interface.So what old browser are you using, Firefox 3 or IE7?
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@MiffTheFox said:
@El_Heffe said:
FF 17. The browser is not the issue. I want an email client, not a "web interface". That's why I only access Gmail via POP3 with my email client. The web is not for everything.@MiffTheFox said:
what's wrong with the gmail web interface?
The web interface.So what old browser are you using, Firefox 3 or IE7?
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@El_Heffe said:
@MiffTheFox said:
@El_Heffe said:
FF 17. The browser is not the issue. I want an email client, not a "web interface". That's why I only access Gmail via POP3 with my email client. The web is not for everything.@MiffTheFox said:
what's wrong with the gmail web interface?
The web interface.So what old browser are you using, Firefox 3 or IE7?
Of course it is! Would you rather I write native code that will only ever run on one operating system, or in the Write-Once-Run-Everywhere environment Sun promised us oh so many years ago? Hell, you don't even need to be online anymore thanks to the Gears local ser- I mean HTML5 application cache.
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@MiffTheFox said:
Of course it is! Would you rather I write native code that will only ever run on one operating system, or in the Write-Once-Run-Everywhere environment Sun promised us oh so many years ago?
Because, unlike Java, when you create a Web Application you never have to test on different browsers. Just try it on one browser, and you know it works on every single other one! Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera all work the same and implement the exact same standards in the exact same way so there is no reason to test things.
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@BC_Programmer said:
Because, unlike Java, when you create a Web Application you never have to test on different browsers. Just try it on one browser, and you know it works on every single other one! Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera all work the same and implement the exact same standards in the exact same way so there is no reason to test things.
Well we're not quite there yet, Firefox just needs to fall back into obscurity so we can have a glorious webkit monoculture. Then everything will be perfect.
Do you think AJAX would have become a thing if there wasn't an IE monoculture at the time?
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@flabdablet said:
If you're talking about people with some kind of emotional commitment to Notepad who persistently find the error on line 377 by pressing the down-arrow key exactly 376 times and flat refuse to learn something more capable
You know if you turn Word wrap off you can turn on the status bar, which tells you which line you are on.
@flabdablet said:
I'm quite glad it's Just There on every Winbox I ever touch and would miss it if it were gone.
True, it's in my muscle memory when I need to store small text. Win+R, notepad, enter. Even though I do use other, better, editors for actual work (Notepad++, UltraEdit, gvim, depending on mood, machine and task)
@flabdablet said:
any method not involving opening a .log file with a text viewer.
Heh, I often install Tail for Win32 just to have the "tail -f filename" from Unix-based OSs. (Lolwut, "filename" is not in the dictionary?)
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@Zemm said:
True, it's in my muscle memory when I need to store small text. Win+R, notepad, enter.
But it's awful for that purpose. The Mac Classic Notepad app worked much better. I actually wrote a clone of it for Windows.
But even if you don't like that, Stickies has been in Windows for, what, 12 years now?
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@blakeyrat said:
But it's awful for that purpose. The Mac Classic Notepad app worked much better. I actually wrote a clone of it for Windows.
Seriously? Apple Notepad is worse than Cardfile. At least with Cardfile you can pick out individual notes!
Computers transcend spatial dimensions. Why would an electronic notebook make you flip through it page by page by page to find the note you want, and then page by page back to wherever you were a minute ago?
Stickies isn't a whole lot more useful. Programs designed by people who really have no idea what computers are capable of.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Seriously? Apple Notepad is worse than Cardfile. At least with Cardfile you can pick out individual notes!
So your alternative is to use an app that requires a save location every time you add anything? And when opened anew doesn't contain the last note you wrote? (i.e. the one you want 99% of the time.)
Mac Classic Notepad might not be the best but it beats Windows Notepad by a mile.
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@blakeyrat said:
The Mac Classic Notepad app worked much better.
SimpleText? I found that VERY Limited, to be honest...
or is this a CDEV or desktop applet that I'm not remembering?
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I only use notepad to store data on a short term basis (I.e. in ram), so saving isn't an issue for me. The main thing I use it for is typing up commit summaries: "* Added method blah blah to blah to account for blah. * Updated blah, blah, and blah to use blah instead of the older blah. * Fixed blah blahing when blah blah." commit, copy from notepad, paste into the summary box
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@BC_Programmer said:
SimpleText? I found that VERY Limited, to be honest...
If I had meant SimpleText I would have said SimpleText. Since I meant Mac Classic Notepad, I said Mac Classic Notepad.
I know it's confusing that it has the same name as the Windows' equivalent to SimpleText, but try to pull your head out of your ass for a few milliseconds and cope. Instead of going all, "I have no clue what you're talking about so I'll just assume you aren't saying what you mean and then call you an idiot." Idiot.
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@blakeyrat said:
So your alternative is to use an app that requires a save location every time you add anything?
No, the Mac equivalent to Windows Notepad is TeachText. (SimpleText is the newer multiple-document version with styl resource support and hackish support for embedded images. And like the Finder, they forgot the Window menu. WTF?)
The Windows equivalent to Apple Notepad was Cardfile; since then, Microsoft have not shipped anything with Windows that fills that gap. The closest thing is OneNote from Office, but that's horrendously overblown. I wrote my own replacement to Apple Notepad for classic Mac OS (styled text, named notes), but since moving back to Windows I use NoteKeeper. Doesn't remember the last note you were in, whereas I think mine did? I forget — could never get a fully working Windows build.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
The Windows equivalent to Apple Notepad was Cardfile; since then, Microsoft have not shipped anything with Windows that fills that gap.
Dude, not three posts ago I mentioned Stickies. Don't be an idiot.
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@blakeyrat said:
Dude, not three posts ago I mentioned Stickies. Don't be an idiot.
Stickies for Windows is a rip off of the same program on Mac OS. It's certainly not a replacement for Cardfile.
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@blakeyrat said:
If I had meant SimpleText I would have said SimpleText. Since I meant Mac Classic Notepad, I said Mac Classic Notepad.
Well, if you are going to be a vindictive asshole, I'll do the same here. There is no such thing as "Mac Classic Notepad".
I know it's confusing that it has the same name as the Windows' equivalent to SimpleText
It doesn't have the same name. Windows Notepad is Notepad. This clearly is called Note Pad. I thought perhaps you were referring to SimpleText, because you used 'Notepad' as the name, when no such product existed in the default OS install.
but try to pull your head out of your ass for a few milliseconds and cope. Instead of going all, "I have no clue what you're talking about so I'll just assume you aren't saying what you mean and then call you an idiot." Idiot.
Note Pad was in fact a DA. evidently not one I hadn't heard of and the one I suspected you meant. The DA, however, is called "Note Pad". I also didn't call you an idiot.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
@blakeyrat said:
Don't know about Stickies or Cardfile but from the sound of it, the equivalent on Windows would be OneNote which is included in OfficeDude, not three posts ago I mentioned Stickies. Don't be an idiot.
Stickies for Windows is a rip off of the same program on Mac OS. It's certainly not a replacement for Cardfile.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Why would an electronic notebook make you flip through it page by page by page to find the note you want, and then page by page back to wherever you were a minute ago?
I believe that's called screwomorphism.
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I haven't played with a newish Thunderbird for quite some while (all mine are 3.x and therefore still relatively pleasant) but I spent last night at my mother-in-law's and this morning she asked for help with hers, which does have the horrible new UI.
The problem she was having was extreme sloth, plus pop-ups complaining that her mailbox was already in use or some such crap, and a complete inability to collect new mails.
Turns out that at some past point she'd accidentally found a way to make TB open multiple instances of itself in multiple windows. This is not supposed to happen any more, as far as I can tell; second and subsequent invocations are simply supposed to activate the first one and bring its new wish-I-was-a-singleton tabs-are-teh-new-hottnezz window to the front. But there must be some old code hanging about from the old version that still allowed multiple windows, because every single time I started the thing up it restored the same set of eight windows it had open on the previous quit, all of which immediately started trying to get to her IMAP mailboxes, stepping on each other's toes and turning the modal dialog for the Software Security Device password into an inaccessible pop-under.
What made this really irritating was that the big red X in the top right corner did not simply close its own window; it actually quit TB entirely and closed them all at once. This, plus the existing-windows-and-tabs restoration, strikes me as some kind of half-arsed attempt at implementing iOS-like app suspension behaviour. So fuck those everything-is-a-phone brain worms. I hate them and all their works. Fuck them right in their wiggly little hind parts.
Right-clicking each window's task bar button and choosing Close got the thing back under control, so I showed her how to do that in case it ever happens again. She immediately proceeded to beat herself up for "not remembering right-click". I pointed out that she shouldn't have needed to remember right-click, that right-clicking on a task bar button is not something most people ever have cause to do, and that what TB was doing to her was just all kinds of wrong. She didn't seem convinced. One more gratuitous blow to the confidence of an ordinary computer user.
I've not been able to reproduce the multiple-open-windows thing; I think it was most likely a misinterpretation of TB's Mozilla-typical incredibly slow start as a non-start, perhaps compounded by some pretty extreme resource grabbage from Skype which was set to autostart at logon, creating a window of opportunity for multiple TB processes to create windows before any of them could get far enough along to become visible to the others.
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@Zecc said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Why would an electronic notebook make you flip through it page by page by page to find the note you want, and then page by page back to wherever you were a minute ago?
I believe that's called screwomorphism.Ha. Sorry, didn't pay attention to this before.
@flabdablet said:
This is not supposed to happen any more, as far as I can tell; second and subsequent invocations are simply supposed to activate the first one ...
Apple "solved" this issue by declaring that there can only be one process per program. Windows doesn't comprehend this — programmers are supposed to lark around with mutexes to ensure that there's only one instance of a program, which is why you can't elevate a separate copy of Explorer (the mutex garbage doesn't compare process owner IDs). It seems like you can't elevate a second copy of Regedit either (also fails to check process owner ID), but there is actually a switch to force opena new copy. You can't use file type verbs to send multiple files to the same instance (e.g. send the selected files to a PNG optimiser at once, instead of opening twenty optipng.exe processes simultaneously) but Send To always sends all files to the same command.
Windows is rotten to the core when it comes to handling processes. One fix is to add a field to the application manifest stating whether the program should be single or multiple instance.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Apple "solved" this issue by declaring that there can only be one process per program. Windows doesn't comprehend this
That's ridiculous. Windows just doesn't go out of its way to enforce it. A design that was, BTW, taken from the Unix-like OSes idiots like you seem to love so much.
The reason Macs enforce "one process per program" is that the original Mac design back in history had to because it wasn't a multi-tasking OS. From there it's just backwards-compatibility and tradition.
But oh wait let's dig a little deeper. If Unix doesn't enforce it, then why would OS X based on Unix enforce it? Surprise surprise the answer is: it doesn't and your entire premise is wrong in the first place and your post has made everybody on this forum just a little bit dumber. (Cocoa apps are a subset of OS X apps.)
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Windows is rotten to the core when it comes to handling processes.
Possibly, but it's no worse than any other modern OS.
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@blakeyrat said:
But oh wait let's dig a little deeper. If Unix doesn't enforce it, then why would OS X based on Unix enforce it? Surprise surprise the answer is: it doesn't and your entire premise is wrong in the first place and your post has made everybody on this forum just a little bit dumber. (Cocoa apps are a subset of OS X apps.)
I don't use OSX enough to know much about this. Could someone clarify? From the above, I'm to gather that you can have multiple processes of the same program, unless the program uses Cocoa. How is "same program" defined? Same executable file? Some other registration mechanism?
Next, assuming that's correct, can anyone clarify why it would be a good thing to mandate this behavior at that level? Is it really mandatory, or something your application can switch on?
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@blakeyrat said:
That's ridiculous. Windows just doesn't go out of its way to enforce it.
I don't believe it should be enforced, but native support should exist to support software where a single process is responsible for multiple documents, and that includes command line tools invoked from the GUI (e.g. by file type verbs) where it's more CPU friendly to pass all the files in same command line. In Windows, there isn't any that I know of, and the mutex hack doesn't work very well. (That said, Windows has a lot of features that are seldom used, such as the ability to report file handle ownership.)
@blakeyrat said:
The reason Macs enforce "one process per program" is that the original Mac design back in history had to because it wasn't a multi-tasking OS. From there it's just backwards-compatibility and tradition.
On EPOC32 (don't know about SIBO) this premise extends down to the file level. In the file manager, files themselves are marked in bold if they're open. I can tap a file and press ^E (File → Close → File), and the OS signals the owning process to close and the file is marked as closed. Like what classic Macs did with programs and folders, but for your documents. The OS pretends to only allow one process per program, but you can override this (e.g. Fn-tap the icon on the silkscreen bar or the Extras bar for a new process, otherwise it just focuses the next process for that program).
I don't know that Apple's decision was a bad one: it's much easier for a user to conceptualise a program without there being processes involved. It avoids the issue seen in Windows where you need one process per document/session, then you have these processes clobber each other's settings files. A program is running, or it's not. AppleScript code talks to a program by its name, without users needing to identify processes.
Obviously this goes back to classic Mac OS days. When I said 'Apple "solved" this issue …' your shoulder aliens whispered to you the bit about where "Apple enforced this at the kernel level in Mac OS X too", which I never said.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I don't believe it should be enforced,
But you just said... aaaaaaaa
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
but native support should exist to support software where a single process is responsible for multiple documents, and that includes command line tools invoked from the GUI (e.g. by file type verbs) where it's more CPU friendly to pass all the files in same command line.
Well fair enough. I can't tell you for sure whether such a mechanism exists in Windows, but that's a 100% wholly different issue than "one-process-per-program".
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
On EPOC32 (don't know about SIBO)
Who gives a fuck?
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
It avoids the issue seen in Windows where you need one process per document/session, then you have these processes clobber each other's settings files.
Correct Windows applications use the Registry for settings that could potentially be clobbered in this way. Microsoft solved this problem decades ago.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
When I said 'Apple "solved" this issue …' your shoulder aliens whispered to you the bit about where "Apple enforced this at the kernel level in Mac OS X too", which I never said.
You made it sound like Apple is doing something different than Windows or Linux, which they aren't.
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@blakeyrat said:
But you just said... aaaaaaaa
Think about the UI in Windows 7 and 8. By default, when you click the taskbar button for a running program, you just get the existing window brought back to the front, or a list of windows to choose from. If you want a new process, you can middle-click. Well, for single-window programs anyway.
One process per program is not enforced, or even supported, but it's encouraged in the UI, if you like, in that the launching and switching to are unified exactly as on a Mac, and that programs are depicted as running or closed. The problem is that this is a sham. If you physically double-click a file, the program still has to have a mutex to check for another process. Or of course use DDE, which mostly works but is a bit fragile, and doesn't seem to get used for anything else. DDE is a sort of like terribly lame copy of Apple Events that is one fragment of a broken overall design.
It's not really cohesive. To you and I, it's not a big issue, but it's extra cognitive load on both developers and especially users, in that it's really not clear what exactly the model is that the system is trying to follow. And you get IE putting tabs into the window list, so what exactly is that supposed to be a list of, exactly? If IE is meant to be tabbed, should middle-click not give me a new tab? My instinct says yes. It's not a cohesive model.
The problem with classic Mac OS at least is that it was fundametally impossible to have two processes open for the same program. Remember TeachText? Remember if you wanted two text files open at once? I had two copies of TeachText so that I could have two files at once, until I got my hands on SimpleText. That was fun :) Mac OS X may no longer enforce this, I don't know. I certainly don't know of any way to have two processes of the same program, nor what the Dock would do if you succeeded. Of course, if you do make it possible for the user, you need a lot of edge cases for software that expects only one process per program. It not easy.
@blakeyrat said:
Who gives a fuck?
You already know that a) most people in IT didn't learn from classic Mac OS, and b) most of them will ask the same question you did, if you mention this to them, or anything interesting about old Macs.
And you're making the same mistake now in believing that no systems except classic Mac OS mattered, rather than recognising that there are a lot of other systems to learn from. You don't have to agree with them all — sometimes, seeing an alternative approach reinforces your faith that your own decision, or one taken by the OS you use, was in fact the correct one after all.
A lot more good systems have faded or died than just classic Mac OS, and a lot of good ideas went down with them.
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Fair point about the Windows confusion. Windows was congealed, not designed, so things like that are to be expected.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
And you're making the same mistake now in believing that no systems except classic Mac OS mattered, rather than recognising that there are a lot of other systems to learn from.
The difference is that Classic Mac was successful.
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@blakeyrat said:
The difference is that Classic Mac was successful.
That's a difficult stance to take. Classic Mac OS was doomed — it probably only dragged out its slow death thanks to the competition having even more flaws. (Mac OS 8 or Windows 95? Pick your poison ;-)
Several of the really good systems were British, and we love to run everything into the ground here. It's more a cultural failure I imagine than any technological issues with the systems. That and their being quite nerdy, while Apple went for novice ease of use, which helped with many people, and drove a lot of good people away. Tough balance, even more so now when nobody expects to have to learn a computer (cf iPad).
That said, EPOC32 became Symbian OS, and that's still thrashing. Just. And the original ARM CPU (the Acorn RISC Machine) was of course designed to run RISC OS (well, ARX actually … ;-) Of course, the ARM owes its success in no small part to investment from Apple! Wise investment, I'd say.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
That's a difficult stance to take. Classic Mac OS was doomed — it probably only dragged out its slow death thanks to the competition having even more flaws. (Mac OS 8 or Windows 95? Pick your poison ;-)
It was less successful than Windows and DOS, more successful than OS/2, BeOS, GeOS, RiscOS, NeXT, AmigaOS, Lisa OS (although it wasn't really a competitor to it).
If you count systems with the OS in ROM, like the Commodore-64, it slips down a few notches, but otherwise it's about as successful you get if you're not Microsoft.
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@blakeyrat said:
It was less successful than Windows and DOS, more successful than OS/2, BeOS, GeOS, RiscOS, NeXT, AmigaOS, Lisa OS (although it wasn't really a competitor to it).
From personal experience, it was the only system I got that I could just use without needing or owning a manual (someone gave me an old Mac to play with). Just plug in, switch on, figure it out immediately, be blissfully happy. Except when I wanted two text files open side by side ;-)
For a consumer OS, that's a huge win. As much as I hate abusive lawyers, Apple had a right to be protective of that level of ingenuity and effort. My Archimedes had no manual either, and RISC OS is incomprehensible without instructions. I still have no idea how to actually administer it, or make it stop telling me something isn't a heap block. Gave the stupid thing away as I couldn't get it to work.
At the same time, Mac OS wasn't the be all and end all of systems. Having RISC OS mouse behaviour would be incredible — no more accidentally copying files when trying to ctrl-click, as you simply toggle the selection with right-click. But then, the only GUI with anything close to sane keyboard control is Windows (and systems that copy it). For example, I imagine most people don't realise that in compliant programs, you can move the focus ring in lists (e.g. folder windows) with ctrl+arrows, toggle with ctrl+space, and select a range end with ctrl+shift+space. I don't want to give up my access to extensive keyboard control.
Commercial success doesn't dictate whether a system is good or bad. An overall bad system can still have incredible ideas wrapped up in a coating of fail. As for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP — not particularly successful in its own right, but it was there waiting for when Apple needed it most.
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Adobe After Effects only allows opening a single instance, and it doesn't allow opening more than one project at a time.
This is both good and bad.
BAD: forget copy+pasting between projects. You have to import the source project to the target project, copy+paste (eg a mask with three keyframes), delete what you imported (eg 10 complex compositions with tens of layers and effects).
GOOD: at least when it crashes it only brings down one project.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
One process per program is not enforced, or even supported, but it's encouraged in the UI, if you like, in that the launching and switching to are unified exactly as on a Mac, and that programs are depicted as running or closed. The problem is that this is a sham. If you physically double-click a file, the program still has to have a mutex to check for another process. Or of course use DDE, which mostly works but is a bit fragile, and doesn't seem to get used for anything else. DDE is a sort of like terribly lame copy of Apple Events that is one fragment of a broken overall design.
Sorry to necro this thread from 2002 but I was just feeling a bit nostalgic about creating 16 bit single document application using DDE and VB3... Ah the fun we had...Edit: This thread is from 2012? WTF?
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Beardsmore is one of those guys who's been frozen in a tube since 2002, so I can see how you'd make that mistake.
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@blakeyrat said:
Beardsmore is one of those guys who's been frozen in a tube since 2002, so I can see how you'd make that mistake.
Probably true. And someone put some brainworms in there before sealing the lid.
