Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!esquire!sbb
From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: [Stolen] Macintosh ROM Source
Message-ID: <1241@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jun 89 12:28:15 GMT
References: <843@orbit.UUCP> <9968@polya.Stanford.EDU> <10273@claris.com>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 39

In article <10273@claris.com> peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce) writes:
>>
>>Windowing systems have been around for a long time.  Don't assume that
>>they are all MacOs derived.
>>
>>Jon
>
>That may be true of straight X, but OSF/Motif sure *seems* to take a
>few ideas from the Mac user interface!

True, straight X lets the developer slap on just about any kind of
interface he wishes (although some of the toolkits, especially Andrew,
help standardize things a bit), and in general this is one of the
worst things about X -- everyone does it his own way and almost
without exception these "homegrown" interfaces are awful.

[ Aside:  I remember seeing a demo of Open Look when Sun first
announced it, and while the Sun rep. was raving about the "push pins"
in dialog boxes (so they stay on the screen), I marveled at the
complete lack of a standard-file open/save box.  The guy was actually
typing file and directory names into this little TextEdit window!
What an advance in the state of the art...  

Maybe this has changed since those early days, but even if it has, boy
are those menus ugly...]

But has anyone seen the X version of FrameMaker running on a Sun or
Apollo?  Except for the fact that the menu bar is attached to the main
window (and that it doesn't operate nearly as well as the Mac's), the
program looks almost *exactly* like a Macintosh application.

Sure makes it easy for me to use, but I wonder what Apple
(specifically, Apple's attorneys) think about it.

--
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   cmcl2!esquire!sbb            | 
   esquire!sbb@cmcl2.nyu.edu    |                           - David Letterman