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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#131

Post by pjmlp »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #103
pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.

Everything "has been done before" in computing. The difference is a matter of degree and attention to detail. And your comment about it having been a thing on mainframes underscores my point. The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing) greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.

So what ideas are actually new, introduced by Linux crowd, instead of copied from either older UNIXes or mainframes?

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#132

Post by eitland »

ithkuil wrote: post #90
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> revealing them only on interaction but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.

Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input field

> Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use.

Or it tells we have given up.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#133

Post by reaperducer »

ithkuil wrote: post #90
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> revealing them only on interaction but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.

Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input field

the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use.

Complain to whom? 99.9999% of technology users have zero clue how to even begin to find out how to complain.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#134

Post by eitland »

pjmlp wrote: post #125
the_af wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The year of Desktop Linux arrived for me about a decade ago. Now I work, game, watch movies, edit graphics and photos, all on Linux. I like and want the powerful combination of the CLI and GUI applications.

Finally met one of the happy 1% from Steam surveys.

Hi, here's another one :-)

Happy Linux user since 2004/5.

Everything else is painful in some way or another.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#136

Post by squarefoot »

mrwh wrote: post #121
socialdemocrat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that is my impression too. Always got the impression that PCs, Macs and Nintendo was bigger in the US. Growing up in Norway in the 80s I remember the Commodore 64 and Amiga really dominated the home computer scene. We used to read computer magazines from Sweden, so it must have been big there too. Pretty much nobody used Macs. Schools used a home grown Norwegian computer system called Tiki, with these odd keyboa…

AMOS! I swapped my copy of Easy AMOS with a school friend's copy of AMOS Professional. It set me on a path to becoming a professional software engineer. (Later, I swapped AMOS for Amiga E. Anyone remember that?)

> Amiga E. Anyone remember that?

I do, and still miss it although today we have really powerful computer languages; kudos to Wouter van Oortmerssen for creating it. But on that little 8MHz machine (mine actually was 7.16 MHz for being a PAL machine), that wonderful little language did wonders. I recall being amazed at how it would compile a several hundred lines program I wrote back then in a few seconds without caching. I miss those years so much!

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#137

Post by codesnik »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #68
bhauer wrote: post #60

A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have m…

It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now. A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.

on mac: Preferences > General > "Click in the scroll bar to:" > "Jump to the spot that's clicked". Though with mac touchpads, I forgot when was the last time I ever clicked the scrollbar.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#138

Post by setpatchaddress »

7thaccount wrote: post #98
CyberDildonics wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to go watch that stuff again before you make your mind up. It is still impressive however that some of these amiga + lightwave effects were done with 12MB of RAM.

I rewatch B5 every few years. It still looks great with some exceptions (Vorlon planet killer looks like it didn't get much time).

A couple of years ago, I watched the whole of Star Trek TOS, TNG, DS9, and then Bablyon 5 one after the other.

So I have to ask whether you're using a modern TV and perhaps what your media source for B5 is. Because, frankly, most aspects of B5 pretty objectively haven't aged well (the elevator scene is one exception), and the FX renders are especially bad, at least from the DVD box set.

I fully believe it looked incredible at the time on a standard def CRT. But TNG still looks OK and DS9 looks good.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#139

Post by mixmastamyk »

codesnik wrote: post #137
mixmastamyk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now. A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.

on mac: Preferences > General > "Click in the scroll bar to:" > "Jump to the spot that's clicked". Though with mac touchpads, I forgot when was the last time I ever clicked the scrollbar.

Not quite the same, I could have been clearer. SGI had (and I want) both behaviors, page on left-click, go directly on middle-click.

Another great one is to lower the window to the bottom on middle-click of the title bar—excellent.

I seem to be able to get all these with Ubuntu Mate, but I'm not sure which toolkits fully support it and which don't.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#140

Post by mixmastamyk »

abrowne wrote: post #122
mixmastamyk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now. A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.

Chromium does this on Linux (at least I assume a three finger trackpad tap is middle click). IIRC, Qt apps show a menu with a "scroll to here" option.

Gtk supports it, at least via Mate it does. The Qt menu convention is copied from Windows, which I think is silly. SGI got it right.
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