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Hallelujah brother! This WIMP business we have inherited from Xerox PARC has been a vexation to me right from the start. Even though Microsoft made things a bit more palatable for me than the Macintosh (no need to do a drag operation in order to select something from a menu bar) and IBM vastly improves over Microsoft (drag and drop, intelligent use of the second mouse button), I do wish that the Xerox researchers had kept in mind that ease of use is distinct from ease of learning. I was much more productive before the GUI revolution, thank you.
I have refused to give up my old but productive word processor, Word Perfect for DOS v6.0. I devoutly wish that it could play more like an OS/2 application--work in a window, understand the OS/2 clipboard, and deal with long file names. But, oh! it lets me work with all those wonderful function keys. I've been using Word Perfect since 1983 and delight that it runs wonderfully in a full-screen OS/2 DOS VDM. One thing that I do with it, a thing that I have not been able to do with any other program, is define a keyboard layout that is wonderfully multilingual. When the language at the cursor is English and I type a letter, I get that letter. When the language is Spanish and type a single quote and an "a", I get an " " (a-tilde). When the language is Greek and type an "a", I get an alpha; when I type a less-than sign and a single quote mark followed by an "a", I get an alpha with a rough breathing mark and an acute accent. I can't get that kind of productivity with a stinking GUI!
Yes, let's get rid of modal dialogs and button bars. Or, rather, let's make intelligent use of them. I think that both can be very useful if thoughtfully devised. Unfortunately, the computer industry, as is many others, is caught up in the need to be stylish.
Incidentally, I gave up on StarOffice. I appreciate the great effort that Star Division has made, but I find the product to be both inscrutable and unwieldy. But then, I think the same thing about Microsoft Word.
I've had people marvel that I know how to use the Windows Program Manager or the OS/2 Presentation Manager without a mouse. Yes, it sticks in my craw that many programs are designed with no consideration given to the keyboard user, but like you I choose to have hope. I vote with my feet, selecting programs that are designed to be usable. Amen to what you say about PMMail--I think the world of it.
Keep up the good ranting! And if you ever hear of a port of *DOS* WordPerfect to OS/2, let me know.
I have to disagree with you about free agent. I tried about free agent and find that triple child window paradigm extremely annoying. It requires far too much scrolling since it is difficult to get enough information in all three windows.
Now, Newsreader/2, that was a program that used windows and the keyboard well. If only it had more features.
David H. McCoy
Mr. McCoy,
I think you have a point about the lack of space for information in the FreeAgent paradigm. I still think it could be a valuable interface design though. But what would be interesting is if, instead of static frames, they were dynamic? Frames could enlarge and shrink themselves on the fly as the focus is changed, thus displaying more information.
What I'm hungry for is an end to the fiddling with windows. The FreeAgent idea comes very close to that goal and that's why I mentioned it.
- Chris
I agree with Chris' Rant. The comment, "a screenfull of my document looks sexier" made me think of how great old Word Perfect for DOS was with its minimalist screen that had only one status line for itself and the rest of the screen for your document.
I installed the IBM WBI and it solved many of the problems regarding link errors.
I somewhat agree with you on the button bar icons. They can become too profuse and without the bubble help are basically worthless. But iconology has its advantages too. Especially in graphics programs. The problem is when one must use many different apps and who can remember all the different icons? Not me.
I think the worst "improvement" ever to be made to the PC was moving the function key set to a horizontal set rather than the original matrix. I read somewhere that the European's forced this - I surprised cause the Europeans are usually ahead of the US in this sort of thing.
Anyway, if you ever worked with a 3270 sytle function key array then you know the power far exceeds a mouse.
On another note which you alluded to: I think one of the problems with OS/2 is that its icons are ugly. One thing you can say about microsoft is that the visual interface is polished. I imagine MS having some graphic art designers working all products before they go out the door. IBMs visual interface looks more like something designed by a programmer that took art in high school.
This is NOT a flame reply to your article. I really wish that Internet voice mail was abundant and practical (controls to speed up/slow down the message would be a must). Only then would we be able to hear the person's intent by the sound of their voice. These are just a couple/few notes.
1) The keyboard you reviewed is very much like the MS "Natural" keyboard. Both of these have the same problem that "normal" keyboards have. And that is that fact that your hand position can not be altered and therefore you or people that get carpul tunnel syndrome will still get it, just in a different part of your hand(s), wrist(s), and elbows. I personally don't suffer from this (thank God), but I know several people that have (since I'm a PC/PC network analyst. I know that you are not suggesting that this will help or relieve this problem (you don't mention it), but this isn't true. Only keyboards that are detachable in the middle to allow different hand positions during the day truly (if actually used per instructions) can prevent carpul tunnel syndrome. Just thought I'd mention that.
2) The Glide Point is really neat and I've tried a keyboard with this. But, based on the problem with graphics intensive programs, I've always gone back to the "eraser head" keyboard. It took me a couple days with lots of use to get really used to it and now people will DIE before they get that keyboard away from me. (just a joke, sort of).
3) I was just wondering. On the MS keyboard the "6" is on the wrong side of the keyboard. Which side is it on with yours.
4) I'm a guy and knew that I would end up having to type when I got an office job (before I even thought of computers since I graduated in 1979), and I bought a Smith Corona II non portable electric typewriter with the correcting cartridge. It's in my attic now, where it belongs. But it was good for its time.
This is in response to Chris Williams' CD-ROM Recording with OS/2 article in the August issue. I was successful in finally getting Gear for OS/2 installed, but found it to be worthless afterwards, since it REQUIRED the removal of your CD-ROM drivers to work. So, I tried their Windows 3.1 version. My 2x CD-ROM was too slow to copy directly from, according to their test burn, so I copied the directories I wanted to my hard disk (all drives in this are SCSI). The test burn now said that it was OK, so I started my first attempt. The process was 82% when a GPF appeared. Great, there's one bad CD. Second attempt; now we get an ambiguous error message about not being able to write to the CD about 10 hrough. Two bad CD's. Third attempt; system freeze. Three bad CD's. I've had enough, this software is garbage.
Unite's CD software looked interesting, but it's pricing is a major turn- off. Why would I want to spend almost $300 for a CD-R program, especially when the (Windows) competition is priced significantly lower? If their software was priced under $100, I would have already bought it...
I think some of your polls could benefit from a comment field. I wanted to make a comment about Java - that I had it installed so that Netscape could use some of the common java script things, without which it seems like the app locks up or misbehaves. Also perhaps another comment on the future could have been 'what you expect' versus 'what you would like'. Of course, I am a curmudgeon.
As an end user who provides consultation to social service and church agencies around their service delivery, I find that the most common platform of my customers is Windows 3.1, and the most common software packages are the components of Microspft Office (Word, Excel and Access). When I do reports for them I need to be able to use these applications to make my work compatible with their systems.
Today it's easier than ever to do cross platform development (Win, OS/2 and Unix) particularly with the growth of JAVA. Anything that I develop will use Java for the user interface and the computational functionality (I do simulation and optimization) will be in any 'portable' language (C, C , Fortran). This gives me access to any system with minimal development or maintenance pain.This works easily for me since the computational parts of the code tend to run as batch (1 - 6 hrs) so can easily be separated from the user interface (input and output reporting). For many truly interactive programs, in my opinion, Java is the way to go - again the transportablity is there almost automatically UNLESS Mickeysoft gets away with there versin of Java!!
Cross platform development is a definite yes for the benefit of the ISV. It also does promote OS/2 as the number of applications increase. If the next version Visual Age for C (4.0?) provides modern day UI controls and produces faster executables, then cross-platfrom development will be easier. In fact if you look at the trends in class libraries like the Dinkum C libraries et al, there is a strong case for cross platform portability.
Cross platform can be a tricky development, but can help (as well as hurt) Os/2.
Take Stardock's "Trials of Battle" game, when that is ported over to other platforms, it'll help improve their Stardock's customer base. Some of the users will then find out that the game is *BETTER* (Hopefully) under OS/2, than under WinXX.
This will cause at least *SOME* activity for the os/2 branch. And hopefully stardock won't do a "Supports Windows, Dos, Unix, etc. ... and OS/2" in their advertising...
I believe any ISV should conduct their business however they see fit. Now for OS/2 itself, OS/2 is my only platform and I plan to have it remain that way. Why? Because it's got better guts that any MS offering. Os/2 was released as a "run all" OS (OS/2, Windows, & DOS). That's the main reason I bought OS/2 2.0 back in 1992. I would like OS/2 to still be a "run-all" platform, even if it can't keep up with with Mr. Geek. I'd like to say I run OS/2 and not have it make any difference whether I want to run OS/2, Java, DOS, Windows, Win95 or NT. Basically, I want the stability of OS/2 no matter what platform an app is developed for. Yes, even if Mr. Geek doesn't like it and continually makes chances to the API to try and thwart the OS/2 user. His actions have the exact opposite effect he's looking for, as least on me.
In your answers from section you mentioned:
Unfortunately, there is currently no support for ATAPI Zip drives, so they're to be avoided if you need one that functions under OS/2. There will be ATAPI support in the future, but how near that future is is not certain.
This is not true. I have the Atapi Zip drive in my OS/2 machine, it runs beautifully, doesn't bog down the system, and I'm very happy with it. The only things that are required are:
Do NOT enter the drive information in your CMOS setup.
Install the NEWDASD drivers, adding the /rf switch to the correct entry
in config.sys, as mentioned in the documentation.
Make sure that the install program for NEWDASD has in fact installed the
drivers in the right directories. For some reason, it has never managed
to get all the files in the right place, and I have to move one
manually.
Reboot, and the drive is accessible.
I enjoyed your review of the three vector art packages, but you left one out that I have been using for years now, for basic drawing tasks like flow charts. It's a piece of IBM EWS called PMDraw, which is very good, for a free program. It is on Hobbes.
Moses Fridman
While it is a great idea to thank people who support OS/2 by giving us good products, (something I usually do anyway if I purchase a product), why not be a bit pro-active and say "thank you" to companies that are wavering in their support.
One good example is Creative Labs which seems to have backed off fromtheir announcement to drop OS/2 support. We migh be able to get them back into the barn again. Just think, if a major multimedia supplier drops OS/2 it makes our nice a lot more of a niche and a lot less mainstream.
Your campaign to thank OS/2 developers is a good idea. But, here's another idea that I'd like to run by you.
Though most folks don't think so, there really are a lot of good OS/2 apps on the market. But, there are exceptions for a couple of software categories. One of these categories is desktop publishing. For some reason, there just aren't any OS/2 desktop publishing programs on the market. I mean, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. Something along the line of Microsoft Publisher for Windows would be more than sufficient for most people.
Anyway, there may be types of software besides this that other folks would like to see developed for OS/2. So, perhaps you could add a feature to your e-Zine where folks could publicly request development of software that we currently can't get for OS/2. Or, perhaps you could just make this the subject of your next survey.
Hey! dont you think you are forgetting someone important? I think the next one should be Brad Wardell, founder of Stardock and numero uno at OS/2 software.
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