To my mind, before Scribus the only GUI DTP software which didn't come from Aldus/Adobe which was even slightly credible was Quark. (I've used Framemaker, Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Pagemaker, InDesign, Quark, and Scribus. I tried the stuff on the Amiga briefly, and it was just frankly painful. I did a lot of Pagemaker work on a Mac IIci with 5MB RAM and a 8*24 (not GC) with a two-page greyscale display, and that was barely painful. It did get a lot worse with System 7, though...:)
Yes. The Commodore ads I saw which marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to design professionals seemed to suggest that Deluxe Paint would be a tool of choice. I don't think that was realistic. The key marketing point seemed to be "Amiga can do color graphics!" without noting a lack of quality tools for vector artwork or resolution independence.
Calamus on the Atari was widely heralded. I used it a bit and it seemed capable and well-engineered. It's still around today.
I don't know if anybody could credibly claim that PageStream had a leg up over Quark or Adobe/Aldus at any point.:D
The former and the latter were really not competing, because of the price difference. They sold to completely different audiences, with different expectations.
Yes, somewhat. That was part of the Apple Macintosh's role.:D
Although the Atari did try (and somewhat succeed) in making inroads in the Macintosh-dominated (Macintosh-created?) desktop publishing market, by offering a competitive alternative to the Macintosh at a lower price.
Commodore also marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to graphic design professionals in trade publications. Whether it "sold" to them is a different matter.
I heart Slashdot's semi-annual Amiga lovefest / flamebait articles.
Books have been written and elegies produced covering the Amiga's history –strengths, weaknesses, mismanagement, influential nature, comparisons to other platforms, etc. One great book (IMHO) is _The Future Was Here_ in MIT's Platform Studies series, written by Jimmy Maher.
As an enthusiastic user of Amiga, Atari, and Commodore computers, I have been struck by a few things recently:
* both the Amiga and the Atari made UNIX accessible to home computer users, as far back as Fred Fish's freely redistributable ports of open-source UNIX tools to the Amiga in the mid-to-late 80s, and the Atari's MultiTOS and MiNT environments. But only the Amiga shipped with a native command-line interface (which was superior to COMMAND.COM in userfriendliness and capability, if not in stability).
* the Amiga dazzled with its graphics and sound when it was introduced, being "best in class" for gaming technology at the time (based on Jay Miner's design), but by the time the 90s arrived, the Amiga was notable for its serious uses as well, namely its multitasking, APIs, and inter-application communication using AREXX –something which IMHO still has never been matched on another platform (think: writing scripts to control and communicate among running, GUI-based apps from multiple vendors –AppleScript never came close). But by that time, its legendary custom chipset was becoming more of a bottleneck and shibboleth, with Commodore unable to deliver significant improvements to it. Commodore was able to introduce incremental improvements, like a VGA "Productivity" mode which allowed high-resolution displays without requiring a flickery interlaced display (a widely-criticized shortcoming of the original chipset)... but it too had shortcomings compared to other dominant platforms, due to deeply-treasured personality traits of the Amiga's architecture, such as bitplane-based graphics.
* the schism between the original Amiga development team (Los Gatos) and eventual Commodore replacements is quite captivating, considering the cultures at play, the hardware/software results (A1000 vs A2000, OS 1.x vs OS 2.x), and the eventual retirement of the Amiga as a consumer product
* considerations of corporate culture at Atari at the launch of the ST (being run by the Tramiel family, meaning the ST was essentially a follow-up to the Commodore 64 and Tramiel's answer to the Macintosh) and corporate culture at Amiga/Hi-Toro illustrate much about the two platforms. I'd say these (and other) cultural differences are still reflected in the demoscene productions on the two platforms. Also interesting is the early involvement of Electronic Arts on the Amiga, who included Xerox PARC alum Dan Silva on their original Amiga software development teams (see Maher's book), and contributed much to the developer experience and cross-application compatibility by encouraging and publishing open standards such as IFF ILBM.
* legends of how the Amiga and Atari (and Acorn and Sinclair and etc.) lost the market to the PC with Windows and MS-DOS often fail to recognize the Apple Macintosh's role –how many early Mac devotees could have been Amiga or Atari (or Acorn or Sinclair) users instead, had they been somehow compelled to make a different purchasing decision (via price or marketing or press or software or workplace culture or...)? So many different platforms were fighting for a diminishing slice of pie until the smaller ones started to die off in '92-'96.
According to the article, studies are showing that people who take Lyft and Uber are people who don't have cars. So it's not keeping cars off the road, it's pulling people who normally would have taken public transportation, walked, or biked, or not made the trip at all, out of their houses and into privately-owned automobiles.
Of course, these studies are being done in cities which already had some public transportation infrastructure. So this is happening where people already could comfortably live lifestyles free of car ownership. Young people with smartphones are finding that Lyft Line and Uber Pool offer these advantages over public transportation:
- vehicle will take them door-to-door without having to walk blocks out of the way to locate specific pickup locations - vehicle will arrive for pick up "pretty soon" rather than "sometime in the next 45 minutes or perhaps not at all if there is some event or mechanical breakdown" - vehicle will stop fewer times between pickup and destination - no need to transfer from one line to another - vehicle guarantees a seat - vehicle may be more clean
All of this for perhaps double or triple the cost of a bus ride — in San Francisco, $2.25 or $2.75 versus, say, $7.25.
Note that I can't find anything in the article which mentions how ride-hailing services are clogging the roads by bringing thousands of cars into the inner city from the suburbs. I know from personal experience and from reading articles that many, many, many of the Uber and Lyft drivers on the roads of San Francisco come from dozens or hundreds of miles away. That is absolutely not getting cars off the road.
At night, Uber and Lyft drivers patrol neighborhoods, driving slowly, looking at their phones, waiting for the next pickup. They sit at stop signs and don't move when it is their turn, waving on other traffic to go instead. During the day, there have been many times I have seen an entire line of cars waiting to turn or waiting for a light to turn green, where every car in the lane is an Uber or Lyft.
Wow, Apple has jumped the shark before even producing their first episode.
Maybe declining revenue from hardware sales could instead be addressed by a return to offering compelling and valuable hardware choices for the consumer to purchase.
(/me waits for news that Apple's new content was produced using tools from Adobe or Avid)
HandBrake was, in its early life, one of the more exciting and useful apps on BeOS. I've always been happy that an app which began life on that alternative operating system has become so widely-used. It made a great pairing with the early VLC ports to BeOS.
Short book report: Great social criticism and honest assessment of the internet and its aftermath abound in Jarett Kobek's _I Hate The Internet_. Funny, thoughtful and cutting. Bought two copies of the book for friends and they both loved it and quoted it to me.
This is just like the thinning-out of available personal computer operating systems. We as consumers are getting less of a choice. Our data and devices are going to be managed by a smaller set of companies.
I like my Symbian phone. I like putting music on it without having to go through Apple, Microsoft, or Google. I just send over my own LAME-encoded MP3s through USB, Bluetooth, or SD-card, and manage my own files. I can do multiple things on the phone at once, and even browse and have control over the phone's whole file system. Microsoft, Apple, and Google don't know what I'm doing on my phone, and can't exert control over my rights. It was comforting knowing that even if Nokia could, they were so ineffectual as a company that they would blunder every opportunity to.
Yes, Symbian is old, difficult, and beyond hope of competing. But it was one more choice that now we won't have.
There was an article posted on/. a while back that showed a two pronged attack on the bees by I think a mite and a pathogen that caused the death of whole hives.
This sounds like some anti-pesticide religious fanatic trying to whip up hysteria while trying to make the FDA and the pesticide industry look bad.
Perhaps the mite and the pathogen could have been fought off by the bees if their immune systems weren't already compromised by this obnoxious chemical.
I wonder if these pixel sizes have something to do with the other problem I'm noticing... it hurts my eyes when the pixels on LCDs are too far apart. So if the screens have a smaller pixel, but a large size, the space between each pixel could increase...? I notice this on my 20" iMac at work, but not on other LCDs... Ellipsis...
That's the *Mattel* Power Glove, actually. OK, yes, it was designed for, and mainly used on, the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was a Mattel product. Not to say that you're claiming otherwise. OK, I'll just shuffle off now.
On pre-Vista Windows boxes, most people ran their default account with godlike administrator privileges. It's either that or:
Run a restricted account Any time you want to install software
Don't forget the software on Pre-Vista Windows which dumbly *requires* you to be logged in as Administrator in order to even function. There's so much of it, but most HP printer utility software is in this category...
There are likely to be components in those PCs which were not made very well and will fail over time. Leaky capacitors, etc. Also the batteries might start leaking. Who knows what else might fail from age... somebody might go find these things 50 years from now and have a pile of toxic chemicals where PCs were expected to be. Fun!
We just bought another 35 of their All-in-ones over the summer, for the computer lab at the university... MPC had a great warranty on their machines, and a great service dept., which let us keep things running smoothly. So much for that!
Now you'll be able to run down to your local mom & pop computer store and buy a PCI card that's got a hacked version of this security chip on it, which'll let you run Mac OS X poorly on an otherwise open platform!
Maybe Apple will start using so many custom chips on their motherboards that PCs will be vastly incompatible, and somebody like Orange Micro will make a PCI add-on card that costs hundreds of dollars which will let you run Mac OS X with native hardware on a no-name, incompatible PC!
"Look ma! I saved $200 from buying Apple hardware!" "Yeah, son, but you paid $300 for a mod chip and extra hardware' "But look, ma! I'm a hacker!#!!@"
Honestly, I didn't use it that much because Be never got around to properly supporting Epson's newer serial printers on PPC. I bought it later for x86 and still didn't do much with it. I bet that development on Productive began to lag around BeOS r4.5, but I remember it being pretty integrated with Tracker on PR2.
Still, though, I've spent much more time in ClarisWorks v4, AppleWorks, and the MS products. I hate Excel, but AbiWord is a joy to use (or was under Be & Linux! Haven't really used it since I got this here PowerBook).
Awhile ago, Apple re-hired much of the team from Gobe, creators of the amazing app Productive for BeOS. Productive was the most tightly-integrated, easy to use, and fast office suite I've ever had the joy to use.
The team that created Productive was also the team behind the original ClarisWorks on the Mac, which too was an amazing feat of integration in a small footprint. Then a different coding team took over, it became AppleWorks, and began to suck royally.
If the team behind Productive is the team behind this rumored office suite, it is going to be one sweet Suite! HA HA HA HA. Seriously, though, they are masters of the art.
Wow. I've been using joe since 1994(?), when I first downloaded it for use on OS/2 Warp 3. Needed a good, familiar text editor to replace the QEdit I'd been using under DOS 5/6.
For creative writing (ascii text files, yo), joe can't be beat. Other "programmers' editors" are too cumbersome.
Nowadays it's the preferred text-mode editor on my PowerBook G4. I think the only machine I still use which hasn't had JOE on it is my Amiga.
Congrats and thanks to the author, whom I will assume is named Joe!
These software packages may look like duds due to their preliminary user-interfaces, but imagine if down the line they connect to the services available from their big business partner, Wal-Mart.
Imagine if users of Ltunes can buy their songs from Wal-Mart for $0.89c apiece, and users of Lphoto can get their pictures printed/duplicated/etc at Wal-Mart Photo for $0.75c apiece.
The shoddiness of the software won't matter so much to its users because it could just be a gateway to real-world services they are accustomed to using: the music store, the one-hour photo.
Slashdot Mirror
...but it largely shied away from the limelight and never gobbled up much market share.
I thought Slashdot just posted its annual Amoeba elegy post last week.
(Sorry.)
To my mind, before Scribus the only GUI DTP software which didn't come from Aldus/Adobe which was even slightly credible was Quark. (I've used Framemaker, Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Pagemaker, InDesign, Quark, and Scribus. I tried the stuff on the Amiga briefly, and it was just frankly painful. I did a lot of Pagemaker work on a Mac IIci with 5MB RAM and a 8*24 (not GC) with a two-page greyscale display, and that was barely painful. It did get a lot worse with System 7, though... :)
Yes. The Commodore ads I saw which marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to design professionals seemed to suggest that Deluxe Paint would be a tool of choice. I don't think that was realistic. The key marketing point seemed to be "Amiga can do color graphics!" without noting a lack of quality tools for vector artwork or resolution independence.
Calamus on the Atari was widely heralded. I used it a bit and it seemed capable and well-engineered. It's still around today.
I don't know if anybody could credibly claim that PageStream had a leg up over Quark or Adobe/Aldus at any point. :D
The former and the latter were really not competing, because of the price difference. They sold to completely different audiences, with different expectations.
Yes, somewhat. That was part of the Apple Macintosh's role. :D
Although the Atari did try (and somewhat succeed) in making inroads in the Macintosh-dominated (Macintosh-created?) desktop publishing market, by offering a competitive alternative to the Macintosh at a lower price.
Commodore also marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to graphic design professionals in trade publications. Whether it "sold" to them is a different matter.
I heart Slashdot's semi-annual Amiga lovefest / flamebait articles.
Books have been written and elegies produced covering the Amiga's history –strengths, weaknesses, mismanagement, influential nature, comparisons to other platforms, etc. One great book (IMHO) is _The Future Was Here_ in MIT's Platform Studies series, written by Jimmy Maher.
As an enthusiastic user of Amiga, Atari, and Commodore computers, I have been struck by a few things recently:
* both the Amiga and the Atari made UNIX accessible to home computer users, as far back as Fred Fish's freely redistributable ports of open-source UNIX tools to the Amiga in the mid-to-late 80s, and the Atari's MultiTOS and MiNT environments. But only the Amiga shipped with a native command-line interface (which was superior to COMMAND.COM in userfriendliness and capability, if not in stability).
* the Amiga dazzled with its graphics and sound when it was introduced, being "best in class" for gaming technology at the time (based on Jay Miner's design), but by the time the 90s arrived, the Amiga was notable for its serious uses as well, namely its multitasking, APIs, and inter-application communication using AREXX –something which IMHO still has never been matched on another platform (think: writing scripts to control and communicate among running, GUI-based apps from multiple vendors –AppleScript never came close). But by that time, its legendary custom chipset was becoming more of a bottleneck and shibboleth, with Commodore unable to deliver significant improvements to it. Commodore was able to introduce incremental improvements, like a VGA "Productivity" mode which allowed high-resolution displays without requiring a flickery interlaced display (a widely-criticized shortcoming of the original chipset)... but it too had shortcomings compared to other dominant platforms, due to deeply-treasured personality traits of the Amiga's architecture, such as bitplane-based graphics.
* the schism between the original Amiga development team (Los Gatos) and eventual Commodore replacements is quite captivating, considering the cultures at play, the hardware/software results (A1000 vs A2000, OS 1.x vs OS 2.x), and the eventual retirement of the Amiga as a consumer product
* considerations of corporate culture at Atari at the launch of the ST (being run by the Tramiel family, meaning the ST was essentially a follow-up to the Commodore 64 and Tramiel's answer to the Macintosh) and corporate culture at Amiga/Hi-Toro illustrate much about the two platforms. I'd say these (and other) cultural differences are still reflected in the demoscene productions on the two platforms. Also interesting is the early involvement of Electronic Arts on the Amiga, who included Xerox PARC alum Dan Silva on their original Amiga software development teams (see Maher's book), and contributed much to the developer experience and cross-application compatibility by encouraging and publishing open standards such as IFF ILBM.
* legends of how the Amiga and Atari (and Acorn and Sinclair and etc.) lost the market to the PC with Windows and MS-DOS often fail to recognize the Apple Macintosh's role –how many early Mac devotees could have been Amiga or Atari (or Acorn or Sinclair) users instead, had they been somehow compelled to make a different purchasing decision (via price or marketing or press or software or workplace culture or...)? So many different platforms were fighting for a diminishing slice of pie until the smaller ones started to die off in '92-'96.
According to the article, studies are showing that people who take Lyft and Uber are people who don't have cars. So it's not keeping cars off the road, it's pulling people who normally would have taken public transportation, walked, or biked, or not made the trip at all, out of their houses and into privately-owned automobiles.
Of course, these studies are being done in cities which already had some public transportation infrastructure. So this is happening where people already could comfortably live lifestyles free of car ownership. Young people with smartphones are finding that Lyft Line and Uber Pool offer these advantages over public transportation:
- vehicle will take them door-to-door without having to walk blocks out of the way to locate specific pickup locations
- vehicle will arrive for pick up "pretty soon" rather than "sometime in the next 45 minutes or perhaps not at all if there is some event or mechanical breakdown"
- vehicle will stop fewer times between pickup and destination
- no need to transfer from one line to another
- vehicle guarantees a seat
- vehicle may be more clean
All of this for perhaps double or triple the cost of a bus ride — in San Francisco, $2.25 or $2.75 versus, say, $7.25.
Note that I can't find anything in the article which mentions how ride-hailing services are clogging the roads by bringing thousands of cars into the inner city from the suburbs. I know from personal experience and from reading articles that many, many, many of the Uber and Lyft drivers on the roads of San Francisco come from dozens or hundreds of miles away. That is absolutely not getting cars off the road.
At night, Uber and Lyft drivers patrol neighborhoods, driving slowly, looking at their phones, waiting for the next pickup. They sit at stop signs and don't move when it is their turn, waving on other traffic to go instead. During the day, there have been many times I have seen an entire line of cars waiting to turn or waiting for a light to turn green, where every car in the lane is an Uber or Lyft.
Wow, Apple has jumped the shark before even producing their first episode.
Maybe declining revenue from hardware sales could instead be addressed by a return to offering compelling and valuable hardware choices for the consumer to purchase.
(/me waits for news that Apple's new content was produced using tools from Adobe or Avid)
HandBrake was, in its early life, one of the more exciting and useful apps on BeOS. I've always been happy that an app which began life on that alternative operating system has become so widely-used. It made a great pairing with the early VLC ports to BeOS.
Short book report: Great social criticism and honest assessment of the internet and its aftermath abound in Jarett Kobek's _I Hate The Internet_. Funny, thoughtful and cutting. Bought two copies of the book for friends and they both loved it and quoted it to me.
The government should go back to running on DEC Alphas and Data General mainframes. Mark Microsoft technology as export-only.
This is just like the thinning-out of available personal computer operating systems. We as consumers are getting less of a choice. Our data and devices are going to be managed by a smaller set of companies.
I like my Symbian phone. I like putting music on it without having to go through Apple, Microsoft, or Google. I just send over my own LAME-encoded MP3s through USB, Bluetooth, or SD-card, and manage my own files. I can do multiple things on the phone at once, and even browse and have control over the phone's whole file system. Microsoft, Apple, and Google don't know what I'm doing on my phone, and can't exert control over my rights. It was comforting knowing that even if Nokia could, they were so ineffectual as a company that they would blunder every opportunity to.
Yes, Symbian is old, difficult, and beyond hope of competing. But it was one more choice that now we won't have.
There was an article posted on /. a while back that showed a two pronged attack on the bees by I think a mite and a pathogen that caused the death of whole hives.
This sounds like some anti-pesticide religious fanatic trying to whip up hysteria while trying to make the FDA and the pesticide industry look bad.
Perhaps the mite and the pathogen could have been fought off by the bees if their immune systems weren't already compromised by this obnoxious chemical.
And the CBS videographer goes home to listen to Kanye West's album, _808s & Heartbreak_, while curled up in a little ball in a corner
I wonder if these pixel sizes have something to do with the other problem I'm noticing... it hurts my eyes when the pixels on LCDs are too far apart. So if the screens have a smaller pixel, but a large size, the space between each pixel could increase...? I notice this on my 20" iMac at work, but not on other LCDs... Ellipsis...
That's the *Mattel* Power Glove, actually. OK, yes, it was designed for, and mainly used on, the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was a Mattel product. Not to say that you're claiming otherwise. OK, I'll just shuffle off now.
On pre-Vista Windows boxes, most people ran their default account with godlike administrator privileges. It's either that or:
Run a restricted account
Any time you want to install software
Don't forget the software on Pre-Vista Windows which dumbly *requires* you to be logged in as Administrator in order to even function. There's so much of it, but most HP printer utility software is in this category...
There are likely to be components in those PCs which were not made very well and will fail over time. Leaky capacitors, etc. Also the batteries might start leaking. Who knows what else might fail from age... somebody might go find these things 50 years from now and have a pile of toxic chemicals where PCs were expected to be. Fun!
We just bought another 35 of their All-in-ones over the summer, for the computer lab at the university... MPC had a great warranty on their machines, and a great service dept., which let us keep things running smoothly. So much for that!
Yay! Another platform to code Java on... :(
Thanks for adding this non-MSDOS-centric note before I had a chance to...
Isn't the whole point of this thread that the guy doesn't want to pay sales tax? Why, then, are you telling him to shop at local shops?
I agree, local shops are great, but they also charge sales tax!
Now you'll be able to run down to your local mom & pop computer store and buy a PCI card that's got a hacked version of this security chip on it, which'll let you run Mac OS X poorly on an otherwise open platform!
Maybe Apple will start using so many custom chips on their motherboards that PCs will be vastly incompatible, and somebody like Orange Micro will make a PCI add-on card that costs hundreds of dollars which will let you run Mac OS X with native hardware on a no-name, incompatible PC!
"Look ma! I saved $200 from buying Apple hardware!"
"Yeah, son, but you paid $300 for a mod chip and extra hardware'
"But look, ma! I'm a hacker!#!!@"
Honestly, I didn't use it that much because Be never got around to properly supporting Epson's newer serial printers on PPC. I bought it later for x86 and still didn't do much with it. I bet that development on Productive began to lag around BeOS r4.5, but I remember it being pretty integrated with Tracker on PR2.
Still, though, I've spent much more time in ClarisWorks v4, AppleWorks, and the MS products. I hate Excel, but AbiWord is a joy to use (or was under Be & Linux! Haven't really used it since I got this here PowerBook).
Awhile ago, Apple re-hired much of the team from Gobe, creators of the amazing app Productive for BeOS. Productive was the most tightly-integrated, easy to use, and fast office suite I've ever had the joy to use.
The team that created Productive was also the team behind the original ClarisWorks on the Mac, which too was an amazing feat of integration in a small footprint. Then a different coding team took over, it became AppleWorks, and began to suck royally.
If the team behind Productive is the team behind this rumored office suite, it is going to be one sweet Suite! HA HA HA HA. Seriously, though, they are masters of the art.
Wow. I've been using joe since 1994(?), when I first downloaded it for use on OS/2 Warp 3. Needed a good, familiar text editor to replace the QEdit I'd been using under DOS 5/6.
For creative writing (ascii text files, yo), joe can't be beat. Other "programmers' editors" are too cumbersome.
Nowadays it's the preferred text-mode editor on my PowerBook G4. I think the only machine I still use which hasn't had JOE on it is my Amiga.
Congrats and thanks to the author, whom I will assume is named Joe!
These software packages may look like duds due to their preliminary user-interfaces, but imagine if down the line they connect to the services available from their big business partner, Wal-Mart.
Imagine if users of Ltunes can buy their songs from Wal-Mart for $0.89c apiece, and users of Lphoto can get their pictures printed/duplicated/etc at Wal-Mart Photo for $0.75c apiece.
The shoddiness of the software won't matter so much to its users because it could just be a gateway to real-world services they are accustomed to using: the music store, the one-hour photo.