Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac.misc:10177 comp.windows.ms:10858 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!math.fu-berlin.de!opal!unido!gmdzi!strobl From: strobl@gmdzi.gmd.de (Wolfgang Strobl) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.windows.ms Subject: Re: give me solid facts: why is the mac better than MeSsy DOS/WINDOWS Message-ID: <4407@gmdzi.gmd.de> Date: 27 Mar 91 19:53:39 GMT Article-I.D.: gmdzi.4407 References: <1991Mar24.025913.29727@amd.com> <1991Mar24.065427.16198@nntp-server.caltech.edu> <1991Mar26.011127.28302@amd.com> <1991Mar26.063111.3133@cs.uoregon.edu> Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.misc Organization: GMD, St. Augustin, F.R. Germany Lines: 73 akm@obelix.cs.uoregon.edu (Anant Kartik Mithal) writes: >I perfer two things in the Mac. First, the file system is much better >than MSDOS, for simple things like the length of a file name, keeping >the lower/upper case-ness of characters, to more complex things like >maintaining seperate resource and data forks, associating icons with >every file, and associating a creating application with a file. All this is not a sign of quality of a filesystem, but of features a filesystem has. Those you mention are quite useless for a filesystem which is used mostly using a command driven interface. They aren't very hard to implement. Adding robustness, support for very large files, support for efficient direct access etc. are much harder to realize. I agree that the MSDOS file system is poor, given todays standards. But it performs quite well for the purposes it was created for. >I also feel that the desktop/icon/running application is much better >integrated in the mac (wrote a paper about that...) This has immediate >consequences fo the user. For example, in Windows, if you have two >icons for Word for Windows, one in the program manager, and one on the >desktop (representing a running, but iconised version of Word), and >you double click on the icon in the program manager, you get an icon >box that says: > ---------------------------------------- > | | > | Microsoft Word is already running | > | | > | OK | > | | > ---------------------------------------- >On the mac, if you double click on the (greyed) icon for Word, you get >back to the running copy. Also, on the Mac, double clicking on a >second word doc gets you into word with the document, with Word for >Windows, you will get the error message. This is only in part because >of the way word is written, it is also because the FileManager, >Program Manager and Desktop are seperate entities in Windows, but all >parts of the same thing in the Macintosh Finder. Not so. Its a bug in WinWord, in my opinion. The normal behaviour of Windows is that you can start as many copies of your application as you like. Opening two documents is usually done by starting two copies of the application. This is no problem from a technical point of view, because all instances of an application share their code, so only one copy of the code has to be in memory. In addition, there is a simple mechanism for these multiple instances to exchange data. Some applications prefer to exist only in one single instance, for some reason or another. WinWord is one of them, obviously. Such applications (which are a minority) have the problem you describe. It could easily be solved by having any secondary instance of such an application send an open request to the primary instance. Cooperation from one of the Managers (file/program) isn't necessary. Why Microsoft didn't implement it that way, who knows. (My theory is that it applies mostly to applications they have to support on both platforms, but I could be wrong). The point I want to make here that this problem is not an architectural deficiency in Windows. Multiple instances make it difficult to decide to which running instance of an application a document to be opened has to be attached, if this operation is performed from the outside, in some manager. But on the other hand, they have advantages. Of course, the problem can be solved by crippling the whole system so that it only allows one instance of an application, i.e. by copying the Mac architecture. This makes the system simpler in some areas (you described one), but makes it more complicated in another (you have to implement multiple document support in each and every application, for example). Wolfgang Strobl #include