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From: folta@tove.cs.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Windows 3.0
Summary: My one hour tour
Message-ID: <24821@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 10 Jun 90 03:45:09 GMT
References: <27@alchemy.UUCP>
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Reply-To: folta@tove.cs.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
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Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
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I played with a friend's 3.0 for about an hour and observed the following:

1. The Control Panel is not "pull-downable" as the Mac's is... it is a separate
   program.  That makes it more of a pain to use.  Thinking back, the
   Control Panel may have only been a folder in the Program Manager, so
   maybe it is modular, though.

   It allows you to set up a background that is tiled, full-screen, or
   bit-mapped.  The "Sound" option intrigued me until I chose it and found
   that it only allows you to chose "On" or "Off".  There were several
   other items like that.

2. The File Manager (you know, the "Mac-like" part) does not seem to have
   a Mac-style iconic view.  It did have name-style listings by name and
   type, and a tree-style listing.  Of course, you launch applications
   based on the three-letter file extension, as they don't have long names
   or file types.

   There appeared to be no way to arrange things in the File Manager or
   Program Manager and have them stay that way between boots.  The Managers
   insisted on grid-aligning everything at the bottom of the Program
   Manager's window, for instance.

3. It doesn't really have a desktop like the Mac. You can iconify running
   processes (and their windows) and move those on the desktop, but they don't
   stay where you put them.  Every boot sees the icons grid-aligned at the
   bottom of the screen.  And files cannot be dragged outside of the File
   Manager's windows.

4. Due to the X-Windows-window-manager-like window frames, you get redundancies,
   with programs having "Exit" under their file menu, but you can also exit
   by selecting "Close" in the frame's menu.  Can you guess how many times
   I exited a program by choosing "Close", which I kept thinking would close
   the window to an icon (from Sun experience)?

5. The kludges that MS has to do so that people can try to use a GUI without
   a mouse cause problems.  There are apparently no single-key keyboard
   accelerators (ala the Mac's CMD-O to open or CMD-P to print, or CMD-C
   to copy).  You must use ALT and a letter to pull down the appropriate
   menu, then another key to choose the option.  The way they mark these
   keystrokes (with underlines) makes their menus busy.  And they made poor
   choices, such as having both "Minimize" and "Maximize" for the frame
   ("Open" and "Close" would have allowed unique first letters).

6. From what I saw, Windows was pretty bullet-proof regarding incompatible
   programs, as it killed them before they killed it.

7. It does virtual memory, and allows programs to exceed 640K, which is a
   godsend for DOS.

8. If I used DOS, I'd immediately get Windows 3.0, but as a Mac user, I am
   not overly impressed at the user level (of course, I did not program it,
   so I cannot comment on their DDE, etc., which sounds neat).
--


Wayne Folta          (folta@cs.umd.edu  128.8.128.8)