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From: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: MusicProse and the encouragement of rumourhood.
Message-ID: <438@heaven.woodside.ca.us>
Date: 28 Feb 91 05:20:31 GMT
References: <120@heurikon.heurikon.com>
Sender: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us
Lines: 45

Gregory Taylor writes

> With that in mind, an interesting thought occurred to me. The last 
> issue of NeXTworld had somebody sitting around with their net ears
> up doing running tallies of the arguments and so forth raging here.
> While I'm uncertain that such a column would continue, it *does*
> occur to me that the bandwidth of the "Trade Press" would be an
> interesting thing to harness here. So, whoever and whenever and 
> however that person may be, listen up:
> 
> Perhaps if this stuff appears IN PRINT in a REAL MAGAZINE, it might
> make a difference. 

This is an interesting and good idea, I think, but even though I am greatly  
interested in Coda's MusicProse product, I would much rather see NeXTWORLD  
fight the new-keyboard battle than the MusicProse battle. Partly because I know  
that NeXT reads NeXTWORLD magazine, and I'm not convinced that the CEO of Coda  
does.

And I also think that the new ANSI keyboards are typical of the weak-spined  
compromise that international standards always require, and there is almost  
nothing so important as the keyboard to a real computer user.

I've mapped my vertical bar to ALT-backarrow thanks to some kind poster who  
wrote a little program to do it, but there's no still no place to put  
backslash.  Just try to write a C program without using "or" (which requires  
two || characters) or newline (which requires \n).

Whatever advances NeXT has made with its wonderful development environment have  
been set back forty or fifty paces simply by making a very  
programmer-unfriendly keyboard.  Even if it were easy to remap the keys,  
productivity is greatly reduced by having to stop and think, having to use ALT  
keys, and other nonsense.

Can you tell that I don't like the new keyboard very much?  I thought I might  
be giving away my sentiments a little bit.

Let's all send messages to Dan Lavin at NeXTWORLD (dlavin@nextwrld.com) voting  
what we think of the new keyboard, and while we're at it, voting for  
MusicProse, and see if that makes it into NeXTWORLD.

--
 Glenn Reid				RightBrain Software
 glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us		NeXT/PostScript developers
 ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn		415-851-1785 (fax 851-1470)