Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 09:53:42 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960227094526.19218B-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960227084804.250A-100000@fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu>
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On Tue, 27 Feb 1996, John Fieber wrote: > On Mon, 26 Feb 1996, Jake Hamby wrote: > > > Winsock, memory-mapped files, etc..) and features that Unix will never have > > a standard for (e.g. context-sensitive hypertext help, unified printing > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > Ahem, ever heard of CDE? Problems of bloatedness aside, it definately > does address this. Heck, the biggest volume of the CDE manuals is about > providing context-sensitive hypertext help! I had CDE running on my SPARC for about 30 minutes before I trashed it for the regular OpenWindows/fvwm combination I had been running before. One big problem (aside from bloatedness) is that it seems right now to be a shell of what Windows offers, it looks like it has the substance but when you try to, e.g., change your preferences it can't deliver. For example, the "Font" control panel, only has one font, but lets you change the size! The "Sounds" control panel, can only change the pitch, volume, and duration of the beep, and on the Sun X Server, only the duration actually works!! (fault of the X Server, not CDE, but still..) Again, CDE is not a unified standard, just one of many possibilities, and on FreeBSD it'd probably be more expensive to buy a copy than a program like TWIN, which at least lets you write to a popular API for which an IDE with GUI tools exists... > With respect to fonts, that is in the domain of X which already handles > bitmap, Adobe, speedo, and I'm not aware of any technical prolems with > adding truetype, but what does the application care anyway? Printing is a > problem but not without a solution, namely a print server that looks like > an X display. Connect to the print server, open a page sized window, draw > into and it gets printed. I know of at least one (very influential) unix > workstation manufacture going this direction. There will be a few > extensions to handle querying the server for possible page geometries and > a few other things. I vaguely recall a freely available X print server > that generates postscript. That sounds like Windows (e.g. you're making GDI calls to the printer).. When and if that happens, give me a call, but again that is one possible standard. If anything, the standard API for printing is outputting raw ASCII or Postscript and that is a pain in the butt! > I think a large factor in the dismal state of GUIs on unix is the simple > fact that many unix users will put up with the most horrendous GUI without > complaint. I might go so far as to say they wouldn't know a good GUI if > it came up and bit them. Since a good UI is considerably harder to > develop than a bad one, why invest in a good one if the users won't even > notice? I agree, 110%! Come to think of it, the ONLY programs I've seen with a decent GUI (that are available on more than one vendor's flavor of Unix) are Netscape, and MAYBE Emacs. That is if you don't count WINE, WABI, TWIN, and Softwindows (evil grin!) ;-) ---Jake
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