Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!dont-send-mail-to-path-lines
From: rick@pbi.COM (Richard M. Goldstein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: OL != Motif
Message-ID: <9102272142.AA02407@marvin.pbi.com>
Date: 27 Feb 91 21:42:35 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 75






I HAD to get my unbiased 2 cents in here.  
(this does not necessarily reflect upon the party-line of my company).



I'm not quite with the program here of people claiming that Open Look
and Motif are a shape-or-position away from being the same interface.


It seems to me that Motif is sorely missing many significant features 
of Open Look, while I can't think of a single component of Motif that
OL parallels.  Not only this, but OSF is CLEARLY being forced to 
play catch-up to Open Look.

The December 10, 1990 issue of UNIX TODAY! has an article which tells
of OSF's plans to add the "Drag and Drop" and stay-up menu features
"around the end of 1991" that Open Look has had from the outset.
Will Motif have as intuitive of metaphors as the pushpin or the
elevator scrollbar?  The article also mentions the mouse conventions 
lacking in Motif but present in OL.  

Once this is done, Motif is still lacking important features such
as pinned popup frames, splittable scrollbars, some control items
such as the gauge, and notices (blocking popups) that Open Look 
has always contained (correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm not familiar 
with what release 1.1 did for Motif).  ASSuming OpenWindows is 
updated by "around the end of 1991" to help complete the OL Spec, 
where will this leave Motif?


This is all, of course, a reflection of the fact that the folks who
designed Open Look had the good sense to START with the style-guide
instead of mashing pre-existing components together and trying to
fit a style-guide to it (and, as somebody posted, continue to modify
the style-guide to match the bugs in the current toolkit).

Also relevant is the fact that the Open Look Functional Spec thought
enough to build-in the intrinsic parts of the environment and how
applications should interact with them.  For example, in the OL 
environment specifies the File Manager application and how other
applications should interact with it (OK, so the current implementation
of Dragon Drop still leaves some of this on the wish list).  So, instead 
of the user having to learn all of the file-management components of 
every application (as with Motif), he has only to learn the one File Manager 
and expect our applications to interact with it in the way he is accustomed.
As an interface designer/developer, I consider this a BIG plus for
the user.


The bottom line is--vendor alignments aside--Open Look is simply
a more complete user-interface specification than is Motif.


Hope this stirs a few of you :-)


rick

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