PCs are still missing a lot---so for that matter is the Mac OS and even Mac OS X.
- Services - Mac OS X has these, but no Webster.app
- built-in PostScript Faxing
- Display PostScript - Mac OS X has Quartz, but one can't execute arbitrary PS code
- general UI - scroll bars on wrong side, crippled print panel, etc.
I've been wanting something like Alan Kay's DynaBook ever since reading _The Mote in God's Eye_ when I was a kid.
Unfortunately there's no decent drawing program for WinCE which does bezier curves and.eps export (unlike for instance FutureWave's SmartSketch---this is the program Flash was based on)
The book, _ThinkPad A Different Shade of Blue_ discusses this somewhat, as does Jerry Kaplan's _Startup_
which was to've been a pen slate system running Go Corp's PenPoint (eventually released as the 710T)
Nice to see, but rather a shame there's no sign of the PenPoint OS---did Taiwan's MITI ever do anything with that when they bought it? --
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Depends. NeXTstep on black hardware was quite price competitive.
OpenStep/x86 was $795 list (though there was special volume pricing to major clients like Chrysler until Apple took that away---also raised the price to $1,495 I believe). Developer Tools were $4,995 I believe.
I bought the $300 Academic set instead though.
Save for at work, I've not bought anything from Apple since the game Through the Looking Glass and my Newton MP100---don't see that changing unless there's a tablet system announcement.
I'll grant that NeXTstep was marketed to users with taste and technical savvy. Your point was?
I gave up on wearing things on a belt, 'cause I got tired of things snagging on coats, banging on car doors, etc. and trimmed down to things which'd fit in pockets, then had a set of shirts tailored with pockets to hold the things which wouldn't fit elsewhere (Newton MP 100 and leather pouch for fountain pens and note cards).
Would urge that you avoid recent version Acrobat.pdfs (none of the v4.pdfs I've seen on government sites really require Acrobat 4-specific features, and Adobe re-negged on their promise that older versions would always be able to read newer files).
Check with your phone people to find out what the most prevalent queries are and make those prominent---might be able to leverage off research done for your voice mail system.
alt tag all the images and avoid unnecessary gee whiz features. Make the developer try accessing the site over a 14.4KB dial-up every so often.
I believe that LyX's components (LaTeX and the various styles) are inherently structured so as to preclude any sort of devolution to Word-like quagmire. Moreover, since stylistic changes require modification of a LaTeX style, people will have to go to an effort which will force a certain amount of consideration as to the appropriateness of their changes. No formatting ribbon or font panel---this is much like the old NeXT program Pages by Pages. This was done in, by the way, by the company's failure to deliver an interactive/visual style design program.
Omega, and PDFTeX address some of the difficulties of TeX, and there's a LaTeX successor too (but I use plain TeX, or rather am learning it).
TeX's superiority in concept can be readily seen in Adobe's use of its H&J (Hyphenation and Justification) algorithm by way of URW's HZ algorithm---that just adds one trick, on-the-fly width adjustment of characters.
Rather than re-create Windows or Palm/Graffiti or Excel, it'd be better if people'd look at the UI problems tabula rasa.
LyX, www.lyx.org does this and it's far more promising than MS Word or a knock-off of same.
Rather than re-create Excel, it'd be far nicer to look at Lotus's now abandoned Improv and do a true 3D spreadsheet which forces one to intelligently/elegantly structure one's data.
Rather than re-work Windows, why not look at a product which which was designed to improve upon it? HP's NewWave was the most intensively object-oriented UI (in execution, not API alas) for the desktop and was killed off by MS for their embarrassment over that.
PenPoint, from Go Corp. was also a very promising UI, with an elegant distinction between tools and data. Darned shame IBM didn't buy them out, or that they didn't choose to partner with IBM instead of HP. and to ultimately link with NeXT.
At least NeXTstep looks to be surviving twice over, once as a hybrid with Mac OS in Mac OS X and again in a purer form as GNUstep, www.gnustep.net
The really tragic thing here is how little understanding of the history is shown in the first book, let alone direct contradictions such as the bull which kills the first Duke Leto not being killed in the arena by his son.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The transcript was a bit rough. Steve Jobs certainly meant (and said) FreeBSD, the person doing the transcribing simply wasn't that technically apt (also wasn't very knowledgeable of the publishing industry as a whole, hard to believe a Seybold employee wouldn't know the advertising firm Chiat-Day).
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The buttons are pretty much indistinguishable, save for the positional cues _until_ the mouse is near them. Then and only then do the symbols which indicate function appear.
It's to be hoped that there'll be a significant enough change in the value _if_ the color has been removed from the buttons on the key w/focus window ---Steve's statement, ``That's graphite, in and out, you can see. Just removes all the color from all the user interface.'' would seem to indicate that, but one can hope not....
I really wish that they'd add a ``color-blind'' option to the UI, which would leave (subdued) versions of the symbols in the buttons at all times.
It's trivial to come up with a situation where the positional cue for one or more buttons is lacking.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Would you care to explain how it is that the PPC Linux developers (www.yellowdoglinux.com, www.linuxppc.com, www.penguinppc.org) are able to develop an OS for these machines for which specs are not available?
Or, let's review the imaging model? How long did it take Be to get _printing_ as a capability of the OS? Similarly, color management, and other high-end publishing features are absent from BeOS.
And then there're the developer tools. Compare and contrast the number of apps which are available for BeOS with those for NeXT/OPENstep---rather sobering, no?
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The new ``Pro Mode'' was the best bit of news for me---I've been complaining of the blue color since Aqua was unveiled.
Rather a shame they didn't take it all the way and offer color schemes to match all the different iMac Flavors/colors.
On the bright side, www.macthemes.org has a couple of notes in their Developer info which indicates Themes for Mac OS X should be feasible, so even if Apple doesn't do it, someone else will.
One other topic which hasn't been touched on is how many third-party utilities get nuked by Mac OS X:
Adobe Type Reunion - don't need it (save for in Classic), got a decent font panel now
Adobe Type Manager Deluxe/Suitcase/FontReserve - got memory to burn to keep all fonts loaded always, and a font panel which makes them manageable.
- nope, got a real OS, real Virtual Memory, and sophisticated file systems
Norton Disk Doctor/Tech Tools Pro - OpenStep hasn't crashed on me in years (and very few times in the six years I've been using it). Plus, for UFS there's fsck.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, its predecessor OpenStep 4.2 is okay on a 25MHz, 68040 w/ 40MB RAM (my NeXT Cube at home).
Apple engineers have posted ibformation on it running adequatly on old Power Mac 6400s, I think they were to comp.sys.next.advocacy, and OpenStep for Intel on modern hardware is by all accounts amazingly quick/responsive (``windows vanish'').
Statements by people running DP4 have been almost wholely positive---especially those with G4s (apparently a lot of the Quartz imaging takes advantage of Altivec in innovative and elegant/efficient ways).
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Adobe renegged on their promise to provide, first a free, then a low-cost license for Display PostScript (DPS), hence Apple's creation of a display toolket based on the open.pdf specification.
Look up posts in comp.sys.next.advocacy for the details on this.
William --
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Slashdot Mirror
PCs are still missing a lot---so for that matter is the Mac OS and even Mac OS X.
- Services - Mac OS X has these, but no Webster.app
- built-in PostScript Faxing
- Display PostScript - Mac OS X has Quartz, but one can't execute arbitrary PS code
- general UI - scroll bars on wrong side, crippled print panel, etc.
Glad I have a Cube at home...
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
There were two color options:
- NeXT Dimension boards with 17 or 21" displays for Cubes 24-bit color (with 8-bits of transparency/alpha) and PS acceleration
- Colr Slabs - 12-bit color with either a 17 or 21" display.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
I've been wanting something like Alan Kay's DynaBook ever since reading _The Mote in God's Eye_ when I was a kid.
.eps export (unlike for instance FutureWave's SmartSketch---this is the program Flash was based on)
Unfortunately there's no decent drawing program for WinCE which does bezier curves and
The book, _ThinkPad A Different Shade of Blue_ discusses this somewhat, as does Jerry Kaplan's _Startup_
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
which was to've been a pen slate system running Go Corp's PenPoint (eventually released as the 710T)
Nice to see, but rather a shame there's no sign of the PenPoint OS---did Taiwan's MITI ever do anything with that when they bought it?
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Depends. NeXTstep on black hardware was quite price competitive.
OpenStep/x86 was $795 list (though there was special volume pricing to major clients like Chrysler until Apple took that away---also raised the price to $1,495 I believe). Developer Tools were $4,995 I believe.
I bought the $300 Academic set instead though.
Save for at work, I've not bought anything from Apple since the game Through the Looking Glass and my Newton MP100---don't see that changing unless there's a tablet system announcement.
I'll grant that NeXTstep was marketed to users with taste and technical savvy. Your point was?
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Uh, take a llok in Applications:Grab Bag:NetProbe.app
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Rather than saying Mac OS X was designed to be like WinNT, say rather WinNT was designed like to one of the abses of Mac OS X, Unix.
WinNT does copy a lot from NeXTstep though, such as its 3D appearance, or drag and drop to the command line from the graphical file manager.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
I gave up on wearing things on a belt, 'cause I got tired of things snagging on coats, banging on car doors, etc. and trimmed down to things which'd fit in pockets, then had a set of shirts tailored with pockets to hold the things which wouldn't fit elsewhere (Newton MP 100 and leather pouch for fountain pens and note cards).
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Agree wholeheartedly.
.pdfs (none of the v4 .pdfs I've seen on government sites really require Acrobat 4-specific features, and Adobe re-negged on their promise that older versions would always be able to read newer files).
Would urge that you avoid recent version Acrobat
Check with your phone people to find out what the most prevalent queries are and make those prominent---might be able to leverage off research done for your voice mail system.
alt tag all the images and avoid unnecessary gee whiz features. Make the developer try accessing the site over a 14.4KB dial-up every so often.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
I believe that LyX's components (LaTeX and the various styles) are inherently structured so as to preclude any sort of devolution to Word-like quagmire. Moreover, since stylistic changes require modification of a LaTeX style, people will have to go to an effort which will force a certain amount of consideration as to the appropriateness of their changes. No formatting ribbon or font panel---this is much like the old NeXT program Pages by Pages. This was done in, by the way, by the company's failure to deliver an interactive/visual style design program.
Omega, and PDFTeX address some of the difficulties of TeX, and there's a LaTeX successor too (but I use plain TeX, or rather am learning it).
TeX's superiority in concept can be readily seen in Adobe's use of its H&J (Hyphenation and Justification) algorithm by way of URW's HZ algorithm---that just adds one trick, on-the-fly width adjustment of characters.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Rather than re-create Windows or Palm/Graffiti or Excel, it'd be better if people'd look at the UI problems tabula rasa.
LyX, www.lyx.org does this and it's far more promising than MS Word or a knock-off of same.
Rather than re-create Excel, it'd be far nicer to look at Lotus's now abandoned Improv and do a true 3D spreadsheet which forces one to intelligently/elegantly structure one's data.
Rather than re-work Windows, why not look at a product which which was designed to improve upon it? HP's NewWave was the most intensively object-oriented UI (in execution, not API alas) for the desktop and was killed off by MS for their embarrassment over that.
PenPoint, from Go Corp. was also a very promising UI, with an elegant distinction between tools and data. Darned shame IBM didn't buy them out, or that they didn't choose to partner with IBM instead of HP. and to ultimately link with NeXT.
At least NeXTstep looks to be surviving twice over, once as a hybrid with Mac OS in Mac OS X and again in a purer form as GNUstep, www.gnustep.net
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
The really tragic thing here is how little understanding of the history is shown in the first book, let alone direct contradictions such as the bull which kills the first Duke Leto not being killed in the arena by his son.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
I've been trying to d/l this for a while, but no joy, 'cause it's re-directed http, and I can't resume that through the proxy here at work.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
- left hand scrollers (the Miller-Browser doesn't work nicely with them on the right)
- no save or fax buttons in the print panel
- pop-up printer list instead of informative scrolling one
- Webster, Oxford's, Digital Librarian/Shakespeare (this should become Digital Gutenberg)
- Display PostScript - no on-the-fly rendering of ps code for dimension lines in apps which don't support them, etc.
- tear-off menus - no instantly customizable UI
- top-level print, hide, quit
- movable main menu
just off the top of my head.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
I'm hoping that there'll be a significant enough change in the hue/value between controls to allow identification.
Unfortunately, one can all-too easily loose the positional context with lots of windows over-lapping.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The transcript was a bit rough. Steve Jobs certainly meant (and said) FreeBSD, the person doing the transcribing simply wasn't that technically apt (also wasn't very knowledgeable of the publishing industry as a whole, hard to believe a Seybold employee wouldn't know the advertising firm Chiat-Day).
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Take a look at publicsource.apple.com and how Darwin is installed/switched to, in particular the ``System Disk'' utility.
The latter can also be useful in setting up yaboot/openfirmware for versions of Linux for PPC.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The buttons are pretty much indistinguishable, save for the positional cues _until_ the mouse is near them. Then and only then do the symbols which indicate function appear.
It's to be hoped that there'll be a significant enough change in the value _if_ the color has been removed from the buttons on the key w/focus window ---Steve's statement, ``That's graphite, in and out, you can see. Just removes all the color from all the user interface.'' would seem to indicate that, but one can hope not....
I really wish that they'd add a ``color-blind'' option to the UI, which would leave (subdued) versions of the symbols in the buttons at all times.
It's trivial to come up with a situation where the positional cue for one or more buttons is lacking.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
I see.
Would you care to explain how it is that the PPC Linux developers (www.yellowdoglinux.com, www.linuxppc.com, www.penguinppc.org) are able to develop an OS for these machines for which specs are not available?
Or, let's review the imaging model? How long did it take Be to get _printing_ as a capability of the OS? Similarly, color management, and other high-end publishing features are absent from BeOS.
And then there're the developer tools. Compare and contrast the number of apps which are available for BeOS with those for NeXT/OPENstep---rather sobering, no?
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
http://www.key3media.com/seyboldseminars/sf2000/pr esentations/keynotes/apple/jobs.html
Should help clear up some of the confusion about, e.g. ``Pro Mode''/Graphite Aqua.
William
PS - mentioned this before, but www.macthemes.org says in their Developer notes that themes for Mac OS X are quite feasible.
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The third entry in that list should've been:
insert Connectix utility here - nope, got a real OS, real Virtual Memory, and sophisticated file systems
Sorry 'bout that.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The new ``Pro Mode'' was the best bit of news for me---I've been complaining of the blue color since Aqua was unveiled.
Rather a shame they didn't take it all the way and offer color schemes to match all the different iMac Flavors/colors.
On the bright side, www.macthemes.org has a couple of notes in their Developer info which indicates Themes for Mac OS X should be feasible, so even if Apple doesn't do it, someone else will.
One other topic which hasn't been touched on is how many third-party utilities get nuked by Mac OS X:
Adobe Type Reunion - don't need it (save for in Classic), got a decent font panel now
Adobe Type Manager Deluxe/Suitcase/FontReserve - got memory to burn to keep all fonts loaded always, and a font panel which makes them manageable.
- nope, got a real OS, real Virtual Memory, and sophisticated file systems
Norton Disk Doctor/Tech Tools Pro - OpenStep hasn't crashed on me in years (and very few times in the six years I've been using it). Plus, for UFS there's fsck.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, its predecessor OpenStep 4.2 is okay on a 25MHz, 68040 w/ 40MB RAM (my NeXT Cube at home).
Apple engineers have posted ibformation on it running adequatly on old Power Mac 6400s, I think they were to comp.sys.next.advocacy, and OpenStep for Intel on modern hardware is by all accounts amazingly quick/responsive (``windows vanish'').
Statements by people running DP4 have been almost wholely positive---especially those with G4s (apparently a lot of the Quartz imaging takes advantage of Altivec in innovative and elegant/efficient ways).
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Adobe renegged on their promise to provide, first a free, then a low-cost license for Display PostScript (DPS), hence Apple's creation of a display toolket based on the open .pdf specification.
Look up posts in comp.sys.next.advocacy for the details on this.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, here's a benchmark done in TeX:
G4/400MHz Yikes! YDL CS 1.1, vmlinux 2.2.10
real 7.669s
user 6.220s
sys 0.300s
Intel-kompatible PCs:
- Intel 486, 66 MHz, kein L2-Cache (Ulrich) 130.8
- Intel 486, 66 MHz, 256K L2-Cache, Redhat-Linux (pcs) 93.4
- Pentium 100, 512kB L2-Cache, OS/2 V4, emTeX (Sarras) 33.9
- Pentium 133, Debian-1.3.1, 256K L2-Cache (Anton) 27.1
- Pentium 133, Redhat-5.0, 256K L2-Cache (Anton) 26.4
- Pentium 133, teTeX von S.u.S.E. Linux 5.1 (Yanikos) 26.2
- Pentium MMX 233, Red Hat 6.0, L2-Cach off (gupu neu) 15.4
- Cyrix 6x86MX 166 (PR200), 512K L2-Cache 15.3
- AMD K6 166, S.u.S.E. Linux, 512K L2-Cache (Franz) 14.5
- Pentium MMX 200, Redhat-5.1 (garbo.ifs) 14.3
- Pentium MMX 233, Red Hat 6.0, L2-Cach on (gupu neu) 12.3
- AMD K6-2 266, 1M L2-Cach (Anton) 9.5
- Pentium II (Klamath), 262 MHz, Redhat-5.2 (scholl.ifs) 9.3
- AMD K6-2 300, 1M Cach, 100MHz-Bus PC100, redhat-5.1 (Anton) 7.8
- Celeron 333, RedHat 5.2 (calis, Herbert) 7.6
- Celeron 450 (overclocked Celeron-300A), 100MHz, PC100 SDRAM 5.5
- AMD K6-3 450, 512K L3-Cach, 100MHz-Bus, Redhat 6.1 (expi) 4.7
Macs:
- PowerMac 7600, 132 MHz PPC 604, 256K L2-Cache,
System 8.1, OzTeX 3.1 (Alex) (real time) 40.5
- Powerbook 3400, 200 Mhz, 32 MB RAM,
MacOS 7.6, OzTeX 3.1 (Brockhaus) (real time) 35.8
- PowerMac, Linux, 200MHz PPC 604e (samhain) 23.7
- Powerbook G3/292Mhz (real time) 18.7
- PowerMac PPC750, 308 Mhz, 1MB 308Mhz Cache, 44MHz System Bus 14.2
- PowerMac 7500 mit G3-Upgrade (308MHz PPC 750, 1MB
Cache, moeglicherweise nicht aktiviert)), Linux 12.3
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams