Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!agate!soda.Berkeley.EDU!dwallach
From: dwallach@soda.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Wallach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Polished details in 2.0 utilities?
Summary: Impressions/questions about the new O.S.
Message-ID: <1990Nov29.015347.24007@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 90 01:53:47 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: UC Berkeley, CS Undergraduate Association
Lines: 75

NeXT was on campus today, and I got to play with a beta NeXTstation running
some beta version of 2.0.  (BTW: They also had a NeXTstation Color which
was pretty slick looking.  Still too many windows are B&W instead of color,
though.  Food for thought...)  

(For those who care, the salesman claimed if I ordered now, I could probably
 have a NeXTstation by January or a NeXTstation Color by April (!)  He says
 this after touting the special deal Steve Jobs has running with the CEO of
 Motorolla.  His pseudo-official stance on the deliveries: "You get what you
 pay for."  Sounds like customer service to me.)

As I drove down deeper into some of the programs, I found rather strange
inconsistencies and oddnesses.  Some things were just indicative of a Beta
release of the operating system (the system performance monitoring program
had these big "Not implemented yet" banners splayed across some of the
meters...) and others made me wonder just what's in this thing.  I'd
like to know if some of the following stuff is really only just Beta
wierdness, or if they actually released software that works sooo wierd.

In Terminal, you can change some of the defaults for a current window
(like font) and have them reflected immediately.  You can change other
things (like reversevideo) and they won't do anything until you open a
new window (but you still get the original font, not the changed one).
Does this sound right to you? Under one of the menus (maybe the one
with font controls in it) you can ask for page layout, and can select
page dimensions and all this other great stuff.  You select it, say
"Ok" and nothing happens.  Sure, none of this makes much sense for a
terminal program, but then why have it in there?

I found that running many of the ApplicationPrograms (AllWithFunnyNames)
from the terminal would tend to give me lots of lines of garbage relating
to not being able to find this that or the other class.  The program would
then pop up as usual.  Is this normal behavior?  Also, if I just ran the
program without backgrounding it, and went back to the terminal, I couldn't
^C the program (it just printed ^C) and I had to ^\ it to make it go away.

When playing with the digital oscilliscope, and the spectrum analyzer, there
was this consistent peak that happened around, oh, 1KHz, even with the micro-
phone unplugged (yes, it was in MIC mode).  Bug in the program, or the hardware?

There appeared to be no way to ditch the click-to-focus nastiness in the
Preferences thing.  Can you get follow-focus (ala twm)?

Well, that's about it for half an hour of messing around.  Don't get me
wrong, though.  I was solidly impressed with the machine.  Interface Builder
is a definite cool thing.  I'm told Sun has such a thing brewing inside
which is of the same caliber, but then anything that isn't finished yet
is inheritently better than what's out :-)  As a whole, I'm pretty impressed,
but it's just all the nitty-gritty details, some of which work just fine
in X, and some of which you wouldn't even consider doing in X, that
concern me.

Some hardware fussing:

The keyboard feel is a little odd, but I guess you can get used to it.
The little NeXT logo in the mouse was kinda irritating on my hand.
I think having the volume and brightness controls on the keyboard is
awfully cute, but completely useless.  Funny, the NeXTstation Color
doesn't have any extra keyboard buttons for Degaussing or Gun Alignment
or anything, jeez :-)  At least the monitor's a Sony.

They didn't actually have any of the 2.88Meg floppies around, so I didn't
get to find out if you get a real filesystem on the thing or if it works
brain dammaged like a Sparcstation (with special hacked tar and eject commands).

I asked how you'd go about scanning something.  My campus rep said that
when he last had to, he did it on a Mac and ftp'ed over the file.  Nobody
knew if you can use those cheap $100 hand-scanners that are available for PC's.

That's about all.  Tell me what you think!

Dan Wallach
dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu

P.S.  I did get this cool T-shirt with the NeXT logo.  Aren't I special :-)