On 23/05/2010 20:54, BillW50 wrote:
>> There are folks out there who insist that [teco | EDT | Emacs | TPU |
>> WS ]... are the only sensible key bindings as devised by God himself.
>> So basically any choice a programmer makes will be wrong for some
>> people. The better programmers allow for the end user to change the
>> key bindings, so that if it really is an issue for a particular user
>> then the user can change it.
>>
>> However even that will not please some users, since they expect it to
>> work in their preferred way (even when that may be less intuitive for
>> the majority) and don't see why they should use the tools provided to
>> configure it the way they want.
>>
>> Not sure what one does about them.
>
> One of the big problems when running applications under the old DOS days
> was everybody had their own key commands. Not a problem if you only ran
> one application all of the time. But if you ran other applications too,
> it would get really confusing.
The situation has improved certainly - common dialogues tend to share
keystrokes across apps. However it gets harder standardise beyond that,
because the features are not standardised.
> One of the big promises when Windows first came out was the promise that
> all of this would become standardized. And if you learned how one
> application worked, you can work any other Windows application as well.
Well partly that is true. Not quite as true as on a mac perhaps, but
then again the barrier to entry for a windows developer has never been
that high, so software quality certainly varies!
> The problem is some did not stick with the same key command standard. So
> those of us who uses many different applications, this becomes very
> confusing.
True, but insisting that every app does it your favoured way will not
fix that either.
>> Thunderbird has these capabilities now so the fact that at some point
>> in the past it did not is not relevant to this discussion.
>
> To see my watched messages under Thunderbird, I must only see them in a
> thread view and only unread threads. Why so limiting? Also to get there
> I must press ALT-V-E-W. Okay fine, but to get back the other view I like
> to use is to sort messages by date with the newest on top. Well that is
> a lot of work toggling between those two views under Thunderbird. It
> doesn't need to be this hard.
True - and I tend to use the mouse for that one...
>>> Thunderbird since day one. Hopefully when TB v4 comes out they will
>>> finally get it. Well maybe it will take until TB v6 you think?
>>
>> I think its pretty good now. Certainly not perfect, but quite usable.
>
> Every time I use Thunderbird it slows me down. Way too much work just to
> do just the simple things. Toggling between those two views I mentioned
> above is one good example.
How often do you need to toggle between though?
>> OE however is a liability and should be avoided IMHO. The fact that it
>> uses a proprietary binary file format, combined with its bug that
>> trashes its mail store when a file reaches et 2 gig boundary, alone is
>> enough to preclude its use in my book. Being tied to the IE6 render
>> engine and the fact that that is now end of life also precludes it as
>> a sensible choice.
>
> I can see it being a concern for one. And I never saw a problem with the
> 2GB boundary either. Nor have I ever experienced message database
> corruption. Although I backup so if one day it happens, I am still good
> anyway. Nor have I ever received a virus through OE either. So I
> personally don't see a problem.
Its fairly common these days a people use mail for storing far more
stuff than they used to.
>>>> I bet OE 4 does not do everything that you want either, why not
>>>> complain about that?
>>>
>>> Before OE4 there was Microsoft Mail and News v1.0. And the only
>>> competitor was Netscape back then. And when IE4 / OE4 came out they
Well to be fair there are loads of mail packages about that predate OE.
Turnpike, Pegasus, the Bat, Elm and others. MS did not really "get" the
internet at all until about '95
>> You seem to be rambling. Perhaps the implicit assumption that TB
>> should emulate or be more like OE is the problem. I expect a good deal
>> of the user base would not see that as a desirable goal.
>
> Well since OE support is no more, there is a large group of users
> looking for a replacement. So some developer making an OE clone would
> probably get millions of users right away.
Possibly... and TB will probably be a reasonable choice for many.
However a good number will skip traditional email apps altogether and
move straight to combined function clients on their phones etc that
integrate IM, facebook, etc...
>> And did what CP/M+ did in < 1MB
>
> Well CP/M 2.2 was limited to 64KB of RAM. And CP/M 3 allowed for 128KB
> (maybe more in 64KB banks). And so an application could only use like
It could do 128K for apps, plus addition space for ram drives etc.
> 50KB and that was it. The trick to get around this limitation was to use
> overlays. So you would swap parts of the application in and out of
> memory. Kind of like a very early version of a swapfile.
Indeed.
>>> was only 25MB for a full install. The OS wasn't the big thing, but
>>
>> And was vastly inferior to the the fully real time and multi tasking
>> QNX at under 1.4MB compressed onto a single floppy.
>
> Sounds great. Although applications is what makes an OS, not an OS
> itself. You could design the world's best OS and it would be useless
> without the many applications to go with it.
Well true, as former users of BEos or AmigaDos will happily attest!
>>> applications got bloated. I have some programs here right now that
>>> requires at least 1GB of RAM for itself. Heck Acronis True Image itself
>>> eats up like 170MB when it isn't even running.
>>
>> Well to an extent we the end users have elected to have it that way.
>> We want software cheaply, which means dealing with the complexity of
>> modern hardware and OS's in a sufficiently short time-scale to bring
>> products to market. That means extensive reuse of code and application
>> frameworks etc. The days of the individual coding the whole app in
>> assembler are long since gone. So it takes a bit more ram - spend £20
>> and add another gig.
>
> Three decades ago I didn't see it that way and I still don't today. As
> many of the developers would purchase the latest and greatest and
> beefiest systems they could buy. Thus for most people, it was out of
> reach for them. I think it takes a lot for a developer to understand the
> latest and greatest shouldn't be your target. But the kind that most
> users actually has.
A couple of decades ago I probably would have agreed. I used to lover
Turbo Pascal 3 as a development environment - blazingly fast compiler,
full editor, etc all in a 50K exe. It used to annoy me slightly that the
run time system added 13K or overhead to a 1 line program, but it was
worth it for the boost in productivity.
Add on sidekick for a pop up editor, advance trace 86, and MASM and you
had a great low level development platform as well. Again all fitting
nicely on a floppy with space to spare.
>> Hardly - excel was bought in basically working and just needed
>> rebranding. Foxpro was lightly warmed over before shipping as a MS
>> product (and stripping the core DB engine for use in access later)
>
> And they sold it to Microsoft why? Btw Excel was also available for OS/2
> as well. I think it even came first before the Windows version.
They made them an offer they could not refuse!
>>> Great software like we used to have. I am not asking too much I don't
>>> think.
>>
>> Such as?
>
> Everybody has their favorites from the past. And I usually like the
> older versions far better than the newer versions. Such as I like OE6
> far better than Windows Live Mail. I like the older versions of
> Thunderbird than the newer ones. I even like the older browsers than the
> newer ones. And I like Windows XP far better than I do with Vista and
> Windows 7. And the list goes on and on.
Personally I have never found a word processor that could beat WP51
under DOS with a task switcher - certainly not for technical documents
anyway.
>>> It is very clear to me that Mozilla doesn't consider acThunderbird as a
>>> serious product. As they will get around to fixing it when they get
>>
>> They have limited resources and have to chose carefully where to spend
>> those. TB was a less important target the FF - I am sure Moz would
>> agree with that appraisal.
>
> I am sure that FF has far more users than TB has. But it is clear which
> one they really don't put a lot of effort in.
They have put less effort in historically - however they did announce
about a year back that more effort was going to be put into TB to get it
back up to date.
>> Netscape were not always in that situation. Then again they did have
>> to content with a competitor attempting to put them out of business[1]
>> using every trick in the book (legal or otherwise).
>
> Actually there was an interview on TV with both of the two guys who
> started Netscape (Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen). And they freely
> admitted that they pushed Microsoft right into that war. As they wanted
> to go head to head with Microsoft. And they fully believed whatever
> Microsoft could do, they could do better.
And to be fair they probably could. What they did not expect was the MS
would give away the product so as to cut off their income stream at the
knees. You look at the first IE (which was a fairly rough port of NCSA
mosaic), and it did not look like much of a threat. (IIRC they stitched
up the original developers of that quite nicely by signing what sounded
like a very attractive licensing deal that guaranteed them a proportion
of the sales volume!)
>> Note, not by producing a better product either. Bus still that is old
>> history.
>
> Those two admitted when they first saw IE4/OE4, they knew it was far
> better than anything that Netscape could ever produce and they knew
> Netscape was finished as a company.
IE4 was way down the line after NS sales of browsers had fallen to
almost nil. Their sole income was from the server side by that time, and
that was being eroded from all sides.
--
Cheers,
John.
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