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Author Topic: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?  (Read 17537 times)

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Offline cgutjahr

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Workbench as a whole is one big annoyance, IMHO. Slow, cumbersome and minimalistic - and the concept of every file having its own icon and storing default tools, positions or whole drawer layouts and settings in there introduces a ton of problems in daily use.

The other thing that always annoyed me was the lack of consistency in the UI interfaces: Some twenty years ago, I counted how many different keyboard shortcuts for answeing a simple yes/no? requester I had to remember. I came up with nine or ten different methods of answering such a requester(Amiga-V/B,Enter/Escape, TAB+Enter, "y"/"ny"...) - most working just for one or two applications, none of them working for all requesters.
 

Offline cgutjahr

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But yes it would be nice if more things other than workbench were aware of their existence. Or that perhaps the filesystem could take some responsibility for ensuring they move or are deleted with their 'data forks'.
One could debate if icons for executables make more or less sense than a resource fork or Linux's '.desktop' files or just storing the information in the executable file's header. But drawers, project files or media featuring their own custom icons just introduces a ton of problems:
  • constantly having to change default tools for stuff you just got from somewhere
  • as an RTG user, you were also constantly resizing and redisplaying drawers, just so you could read the filenames
  • You're constantly fixing the appearance of something because icons look ugly/out of place or they don't display at all
  • global changes are pretty much impossible: You want to switch to another icon set, or use a different default picture viewer? Have fun changing hundreds of icons
  • nothing respects your personal preference for how drawer contents should be displayed
  • listing directory contents becomes dog slow (on 1992/1993 computers)
  • I need to tell (e.g.) my text editor whether to create icons (1st useless configuration option), what default tool to insert (2nd useless config option) and how to deal with existing icons (3rd useless config option)
Yeah, you could create workarounds for most of these problems. But it would be way easier to just ignore any icon not associated with an executable file, and ignore position data for executable icons. And then let the system handle all that icon business automatically.

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As for shortcuts and UI, it would have been nice if more apps had followed the AUISG suggestions
Agreed, but I think the bigger problem was that people never used the official toolkit(s) because...

...in the eighties there wasn't any (to speak of)
...in the early nineties, most of your users were still on 1.x (and you didn't fancy rewriting your entire GUI)
...in the mid/late nineties, Gadtools was already outdated so everybody was coming up with extensions again
« Last Edit: March 11, 2021, 05:00:49 PM by cgutjahr »
 

Offline cgutjahr

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My workflow has always been Workbench for front-end UI, DOpus4 for back-end file operations.
Sure, so was mine - and probably every other Amiga user's. But "frontend UI" basically means using WB as a program launcher - and for that little functionality, you had to spend way too much time finetuning it IMHO.

I'm not bashing WB btw. - back in the early nineties, all the desktops had tons of annoying quirks. It's just that WB never evolved, and we've been using it way past it's original expiry date.

I thought LeftAmiga V/B was universally recognized by Intuition?
No, it's an ASL thing, not intuition (IIRC - it's been a while). Meaning that any application not using ASL would usually not respect these shortcuts.

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I guess not. What could Commodore have done here to enforce standards?
The original Kickstart didn't have any UI toolkit worth mentioning, due to lack of time and ressources, and probably Mical's lack of experience and research on the subject. Once you sold millions of machines with that version of the OS, you have a problem. Commodore would have had to come out with a UI toolkit addon ASAP. One that worked under 1.x and was free to install (or distribute with commercial applications). But that's probably asking too much, given Commodore's problems at the time, and the total lack of any UI experience - let alone research on the subject.
 

Offline cgutjahr

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That certainly explains the lack of standardization in the 1.x era. But then we had ASL/GadTools with OS2.0. In other words, why didn't that "fix" the problem from then on? Was it too late by that point to get compliance from developers?
Commodore Germany sold about 1.3 million Amigas running Kickstart 1.x (A1000, A500, most A2000s, CDTV) and some 0.2 million Amigas running 2.x (A500+, 600, later A2000s). Obviously, any sane software developer would target Kickstart 1.x.

The situation would only change later, when the A1200 showed up and most A500 users would abandon the platform for the PC.

Gadtools was by no means a full featured 'widgets' toolkit, it's pretty bare bones in terms of what it offers, and you have to do things like dynamic font size support and dynamic layout yourself which is a chore.
Sure, but we're talking 1990 here, I doubt the competition was doing any better back then?
« Last Edit: March 11, 2021, 06:26:21 PM by cgutjahr »