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I loved the Amiga, but I will grant you one thing: It wasn't so great at
switching between windows. Each window had two "gadgets" (what we today
call widgets), one to raise and one to lower the window. Today you just
click on a window and it comes to the front, but the Amiga did not do
this. You had to click the gadget.
An obvious consequence of this is that if the gadget was hidden behind
something else, it was impossible to bring the window to the front. Or
rather, you'd have to lower whatever was obscuring it. Suffice it to say
that you could occasionally get into tricky situations where a window
would get "lost" and it was quite hard to bring it to the front.
Initially I hated Windoze. Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower. (Today of
course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,
whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too
hard to use.)
One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar. With this handy gizmo,
you can immediately access any window you have open. And then there's
the Alt+Tab shortcut - invaluable on crappy laptops that don't have a
real mouse.
Today it seems to be all the rage for applications to have "tabbed"
interfaces - most obviously web browsers, but also many other
applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look
at several things at once, and I want to switch between them,
*sometimes* I need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of
the screen, and *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at
the top of the screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too
simple to get this right most of the time.
Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
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