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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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> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar.
Acorn's OS had a task bar almost a decade before Windows came along with it,
drives and other storage locations would build up from the left, and running
programs would build up from the right. It would even scroll left/right if
you ran so much stuff that there was no space left.
> 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.
Ctrl-Tab also works in most tabbed applications to switch between tabs, if
that helps at all. I guess if you have several instances of FF running,
each with several tabs you might get confused, but generally I only have one
instance of FF, one of Visual Studio, one of Excel etc, so mentally I
realise that there are tabs within each application.
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Invisible wrote:
> 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?
In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand experience.
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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
> Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
>
> But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand experience.
Really? Mmm, interesting. I'll have to try that next time I fire up the
Windows 7 VM...
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scott wrote:
>> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar.
>
> Acorn's OS had a task bar almost a decade before Windows came along with
> it.
Heh, why does that not surprise me?
BTW, isn't it amusing that for a decade Linux has been trying to look
more like Windows, and with Windows 7, now Windows is trying to look
more like Linux. (!)
> Ctrl-Tab also works in most tabbed applications to switch between tabs,
> if that helps at all.
Really? Ooo, sweet!
> I guess if you have several instances of FF
> running, each with several tabs you might get confused, but generally I
> only have one instance of FF, one of Visual Studio, one of Excel etc, so
> mentally I realise that there are tabs within each application.
In theory you'd think it would be simple. But when I'm working on
several things at once, I quite often find myself trying to switch
between (say) a document and its source code, and switching to the wrong
window. When you're trying to quickly flip between several things, the
fact that sometimes you need to click the task bar and sometimes the tab
bar seems really confusing.
For example, I write a Haskell program that generates some HTML. I've
now got the Haskell source code and the HTML open in several tabs in my
text editor, and of course the HTML open in Firefox. So if I find
something in Firefox that's wrong, I need to use the taskbar to flip
back to the text editor, and then probably another mouse click to flip
to the right tab. Gets even more confusing if I have a console window
open and I'm editing the batch file it runs from within the text editor...
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower.
Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?
Even Windows can't do magic if it doesn't have the graphics hardware
acceleration support.
Oh, you are not comparing PC's of the time, but more modern PC's? Well,
let's see your beloved amiga update its screen at 1600x1200 resolution with
16 million colors with a refresh rate of 80 Hz, playing a H.264 hi-def video
on the background while you write an email. Then we might perhaps start
talking about "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.)
Yeah, that's probably why I use Linux 99% of the time, while I use Windows
only for playing PC games. I must be a masochist.
Honestly, I just can't do *anything* in Windows, other than play games or
perhaps watch multimedia (if I don't happen to be in Linux just then).
Trying to eg. develop anything is just a pain. I'm always hindered by not
being able to do things I can easily do in Linux. Heck, even just finding
a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
anything more advanced than that.
(Yeah yeah, I know, you can do everything you can do in Linux and far more.
There are all these fancy scripting languages and whatnot, which you might be
able to use if you install something and something else. Nothing really
consistent, and always a pain.)
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
>> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower.
>
> Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
> acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
> that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?
Because the PCs at college had 133 MHz CPUs and 32 MB of RAM - multiple
times the Amiga's 7 MHz CPU (admittedly of completely different design)
and 2 MB of RAM. And yet, on such a machine, even something as simple as
closing a window causes huge amounts of disk thrashing.
> Even Windows can't do magic if it doesn't have the graphics hardware
> acceleration support.
It didn't seem to me that that was the problem. Lacking graphics
hardware acceleration doesn't make the HD thrash. And anyway, I thought
the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
> Oh, you are not comparing PC's of the time, but more modern PC's?
PCs today have finally reached the point where they're about as fast as
an Amiga for basic windowing operations. But it's taken an awfully long
time.
>> (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.)
>
> Yeah, that's probably why I use Linux 99% of the time, while I use Windows
> only for playing PC games. I must be a masochist.
Or you know something I don't. (Such as... how to operate Linux.)
> Honestly, I just can't do *anything* in Windows, other than play games or
> perhaps watch multimedia (if I don't happen to be in Linux just then).
That pretty much describes me and Linux. Even something trivial like
configuring a network interface without DHCP seems excruciatingly hard
in Linux. (As best as I can tell, you have to hand-edit half a dozen
files, invoke cryptic commands, and so forth. It's a nightmare.) Under
Windows, you just right-click on the network interface and type in what
you want the settings to be.
> Trying to eg. develop anything is just a pain.
Presumably that depends on what you're trying to develop, and with that.
Certainly Windows is not designed with developers in mind.
> I'm always hindered by not
> being able to do things I can easily do in Linux. Heck, even just finding
> a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> anything more advanced than that.
...why in the name of god would you ever want to do such a thing? And
wouldn't that require reading every individual byte of data on the
entire HD anyway, regardless of OS?
> (Yeah yeah, I know, you can do everything you can do in Linux and far more.
> There are all these fancy scripting languages and whatnot, which you might be
> able to use if you install something and something else. Nothing really
> consistent, and always a pain.)
I'm not a fan of scripting languages. They tend to be too ugly and
messy. Besides, I've never found anything I wanted to script [which is
actually scriptable]...
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On 21/04/2010 2:32 PM, Invisible wrote:
> 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?
No it is just you ;-)
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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>> Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
>
> No it is just you ;-)
Oh thank god...
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>> Acorn's OS had a task bar almost a decade before Windows came along with
>> it.
>
> Heh, why does that not surprise me?
Here's a screenshot I found from 1987!
http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/arthur2.gif
And 1989:
http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/riscos2.gif
And 1991:
http://toastytech.com/guis/riscosnewlook.gif
And 1994, Windows still didn't have a task bar:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/73/Windows_3.11_workspace.png
I still remember my IT teacher at school telling me in 1995 that he heard
the new Windows OS was going to have a "task bar", and how they had copied
the Acorn design. In fairness I doubt that whoever decided on the task bar
had even seen an Acorn machine before. Although there is a classic anecdote
going around the Acorn world that apparently Bill Gates was once watching a
demo from Acorn of how to network machines together, and he asked "what's a
network?".
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