Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 09:14:17 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960227084804.250A-100000@fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <01BB042E.4636BDE0@hamby1.lightside.net>
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On Mon, 26 Feb 1996, Jake Hamby wrote:
> Winsock, memory-mapped files, etc..) and features that Unix will never have
> a standard for (e.g. context-sensitive hypertext help, unified printing
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ahem, ever heard of CDE? Problems of bloatedness aside, it definately
does address this. Heck, the biggest volume of the CDE manuals is about
providing context-sensitive hypertext help!
> system, unified TrueType font system, OLE). Now I agree that, for example,
With respect to fonts, that is in the domain of X which already handles
bitmap, Adobe, speedo, and I'm not aware of any technical prolems with
adding truetype, but what does the application care anyway? Printing is a
problem but not without a solution, namely a print server that looks like
an X display. Connect to the print server, open a page sized window, draw
into and it gets printed. I know of at least one (very influential) unix
workstation manufacture going this direction. There will be a few
extensions to handle querying the server for possible page geometries and
a few other things. I vaguely recall a freely available X print server
that generates postscript.
I think a large factor in the dismal state of GUIs on unix is the simple
fact that many unix users will put up with the most horrendous GUI without
complaint. I might go so far as to say they wouldn't know a good GUI if
it came up and bit them. Since a good UI is considerably harder to
develop than a bad one, why invest in a good one if the users won't even
notice?
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ============
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