| From: | Uffe Holst |
| Date: | 12 Jan 2000 at 10:33:10 |
| Subject: | Re: MUI, having nothing to do with OS3.5 |
From: Uffe Holst <uhc@post6.tele.dk>
In a message of 11-Jan-00 Xavier Messersmith wrote:
I will keep this short, because currently our discussion is not really
leading anywhere.
>>> I understand the "I'm a programmer, I can't be bothered with providing the
>>> user an interface."
>>
>> That is not true. I think you can find a lot of programmers that want to
>> give their users a great interface and therefore choose to use MUI because
>> it offers the best features in GUI handling for the user.
> I think the main reason is that MUI does alot of what the programmer would
> formerly have to do himself.
Yes, perhaps also true.
Have you ever tried making a GUI. Simple Intuition/GadTools GUI's are
certainly not easy to use, and the result is a dull static GUI. Of course
it serves its purpose, but it looks exactly the way the programmer has
made it and not how you want to make it.
Expert programmres can naturally expand GadTools GUI's to offer everything
that MUI also offers, but it requires a lot of work [see all next
paragraph] - just to make a font-sensitive GUI requires so much more than
the simple non-sensitive GUI.
As I said above it requires a lot more work. This naturally also lead to
a lot more code to be checked for bugs. And let us not forget that making
such GUI's is quite difficult, because it is not simple.
Just take a look at an application like YAM - it is really a quite simple
application - retrieve message, parse message, store message correctly,
show message. I am not an experienced programmer, but I am still sure that
I would be able to make a mail reader with the same functionality as YAM
given the necessary time to do so. But I am not able to make my own
font-sensitive configurable GUI for it, because this is very difficult.
I have never used MUI myself. When I had the time available to do
programming I was using a 030 and since MUI isn't suited for such a
processor I naturally didn't use it. But I have used Triton and it is
really remarkable how easy it suddenly becomes even for novice programmers
to add a nice configurable GUI to their applications - because and expert
programmer has done all the hard work.
> For most applications an '030 at 25 MHz should suffice.
This is actually the main problem in our discussion that you have that
attitude. More processor power gives you a much more free environment
to run your applications under opening up for possibilities not available
on slower processors.
As you perhaps have heard, Steve Koren decided to stop developing NewsRog
due to several reason a week or so ago - main reason being that it is
being pirated and nobody is really registering it any more. The following
is something he wrote a couple of days ago:
"Unfortunately, Amiga software development is in a really sorry state. Most
of what's left now is garage/hobbyist-coder type operations. It's hard for
Amiga apps to stand toe-to-toe with PC apps when the PC version might
generate ten thousand times the revenue stream of the Amiga app, and when
Amiga users demand that things run on a 68020 with 4 Mb of memory and AGA
graphics."
> Note that I get alot more problems out of MUI apps than I do ClassAct (or is
> that Reactor nowadays?).
The only ClassAct application I am using now and then is AWeb, and it
crashes happily.
>> No, I am certainly not saying that. I am more likely saying that MUI is a
>> great effort to make the Amiga the leading platform.
> Through brute force tactics. Something that the Amiga typically doesn't handle
> very well.
It would handle it quite well if the users upgraded their old equipment.
Personally I think it is a bit sad that we are stuck with all that old
crap, because it puts so many restraints on the programmers. The user
base is so little and if they programmers want to earn a little they
have to support a processor that goes more than a decade back.
Well, as you can see I have made this message quite small and refrained
from commenting most of your comments, because my comments would only have
been a reiteration of my previous statements.
Uffe Holst
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