Thoughts on the A1Lite and mainstream markets

[mdwh2]

Karlos wrote:
I know. I said they were faster in CPU terms (the systems our school got I mean), not prettier.

Its an irrelavent argument, you see, just like comaring the price/preformance of the A1Lite to x86 based ITX systems :-)

But the thing is that nowadays, an x86 system will beat the Amiga price/performancewise both in terms of raw CPU power *and* graphics (and just about everything else besides), where as with the A500 it was a case of having better graphics for the price.

I agree that a machine can still have a market even if it's more expensive, but it's not true that the Amiga has always been in this position.

[mdwh2]

@DonnyEMU

Interesting. Nice to see that Windows may finally catch up with what MUI was doing ten years ago. I much prefer having a GUI that has a sensible layout system, without expecting me as the programmer to specify x/y coordinates for everything. I'll be curious to see how well Windows does this (eg, Java has layout managers too, but I find them more awkward compared with MUI).

I also prefer writing my interfaces in code - which of course means that the language must make this easy to do - rather than faffing around with "Visual" GUI editors.

The examples shown there are pretty basic though. Show me some code that easily creates a tabbedpane/propertysheet;)

[mdwh2]

Continuing on from what I said, I had a look at another article. The last one there is the "Color Scroll". I was amused by the "Part of the challenge of writing such a program using either the Windows API or Windows Forms involves moving and resizing all the components of the window. This is an area where Avalon really shines." - wow, revolutionary!

At the end, it says "The most recent Win32 API version of this program (called COLORS1 in the fifth edition of Programming Windows) is 250 lines long. The Windows Forms version in Programming Microsoft Windows with C# is about 100 lines. This new version is only about 60 lines long, and I'm pretty sure that it can be pruned even more by using inheritance." - well, 55 lines I counted, if we ignore the blank lines to make comparisons a bit fairer.

"From 250 lines to 100 and now 60. And that, my friends, is what is commonly called progress." Hmm, the equivalent MUI program I quickly knocked up comes in at 53 lines;) (and yes, that includes the lines for declaring variables and header includes etc that you need to do in C, and no I haven't crammed everything together, it's still nicely formatted). As is typical of Microsoft developments, I can see this being a case of a huge step forward - but only from the point of view of Windows development.