Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 20:44:20 -0800 From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>, "'Narvi'" <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee> Cc: "hackers@FreeBSD.org" <hackers@FreeBSD.org> Subject: RE: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Message-ID: <01BB0554.637FC410@hamby1.lightside.net>
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>Not exactly to the point... > 1) You cannot change the sound's parameters (should a particular > thing happen not to sound correct) under the sound icon - go > to the drivers config.... > 2) Several events? Actually not several but just some spcific > windows events. > 3) If your mouse freezes during playing the sounds, then you just > have told windows to "disable interrupts while playing the sound". 1) Okay you can't EDIT the sound from within the control panel, or change the volume, but I don't find those features necessary, I would use a separate program to do that. 2) Well yes, but Windows 95 (and NT beta) have a lot more built-in associations, and third-party programs (like Icon-Hear-It) to do the same thing have been around for several years. Also, individual programs can add sound events to the Sound control panel by adding entries in the .INI. 3) No, that is the fault of the PC speaker driver for sound. That's why I said that you should BUY A SOUND CARD. The PC speaker was not intended to play digitized sounds through, and to do so is a kludge and takes a lot of CPU intervention, regardless of the OS. >The very same thing - not windows original idea, not the best possible >way - should you want to port it to FreeBSD, you should look at it with a >more broader viewpoint and make a broader port having the windows >implementation as just a subset. Fair enough, I just thought Windows was a good example, and basically our competition (well, besides Linux, which now has Caldera Desktop which might solve some of these problems, I haven't really looked at it)... >GDI calls? I would very much like them to be a bit different... Windows >GDI is quite pixel-device oriented. Just imagine that all who wanted to >print something emitted postscript... if the printer didn't support it in >native mode, it would be filtered through Ghostscript. I'm saying that you need to support GDI ANYWAY to draw to the screen, so when you want to print you can reuse that entire section of code. If you need to emit Postscript, you have to completely reemplement your screen drawing code, rather than reusing it! And GDI is not entirely pixel-device oriented, you can still communicate with a line printer or plotter if you limit yourself to GDI font calls for built-in fonts on the former, and vector-oriented GDI calls (e.g. plotter fonts and line drawing) on the latter. Where is the problem? >Until the functionality suits you - after that you will start infinetly >writing new derived classes - yes the code (on the surface) would remain >still short. Yes, that's the point of C++, inheritance allows you to reuse code. Sure your MFC Windows "Hello world!" program would be 150k if you statically linked it with the MFC libraries, but thanks to shared libraries, er DLL's, your program is back to 20k (the same size as a C Windows app) but now has Print/Print Preview, toolbar, status bar, and a lot of other functionality built in. So not only do you save typing, but your program is smaller, to boot! >Talking about real good GUIs... How do you define one? Windows certainly >is not a GUI unified enough and there are quite some programs I really >don't think should be like that at all - for several reasons the list >contains Word 6.0, Corel Draw 5.0 and Windows95 (I will discuss none of >these in this list). Sure, Windows is not unified like the Mac, but it is MUCH better than Unix. With Motif, Tcl/Tk, OpenLook, Athena, and various Xlib-derived toolkits, almost every Unix program is very different from every other. If it weren't for the ICCCM, they wouldn't even be able to communicate via cut-n-paste, and even there, all they can exchange is typically text. >XF has a good GUI as well as fdesign - at least compareable to the >equivalent commercial programs for the Windows environment. XV has a good GUI, I forgot about that one. Haven't seen XF or fdesign, though. ---Jake
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