POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Context switching : Context switching Server Time
4 Sep 2024 07:19:10 EDT (-0400)
  Context switching  
From: Invisible
Date: 21 Apr 2010 09:32:18
Message: <4bcefe62$1@news.povray.org>
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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