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From: olson@endor.harvard.edu (Eric Olson)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: A few questions
Message-ID: <233@husc6.HARVARD.EDU>
Date: Mon, 22-Sep-86 13:01:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: husc6.233
Posted: Mon Sep 22 13:01:29 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Sep-86 21:13:32 EDT
Sender: news@husc6.HARVARD.EDU
Reply-To: olson@endor.UUCP (Eric Olson)
Distribution: world
Organization: Aiken Computation Lab, Harvard University
Lines: 76

References:


OK, guys, I have a few questions for anyone to try to field about the ST:

- Why "lazy" menus?  I am constantly going for the top of a window and ending
up in the menu bar.  This causes a menu pull, and I have to go far away from
where I'm trying to click just to get the thing to go away.  Is there a way
to turn this off (i.e., make it like the Mac?).

- When I try to (for instance) grow a window, sometimes the ST doesn't 
realize I've pressed the mouse button until the pointer is no longer on
the grow box.  I pressed the button while it was on the grow box, though
(I'm quite sure).  It seems like the button is checked only about 4 times
a second.  Is there any way to speed this up?

- If I edit the DESKTOP.INF file so that one of the windows displays
only *.PRG files, it works until the window is closed and reopened.  But
the window display remains d:\.  This isn't that important, but is there
a way to fix it?

- When I grow a window, the corner of the frame immediately jumps to the
tip of the pointer, rather than tracking on the point where I pressed the
mouse button.  Is this avoidable?

- The Resource Construction Set allows creation of Alerts, but there is no
call to run them.  The form_alert call creates the alert from a text string
instead.  Do I need to write my own routine to run an alert from a .RSC
file?  (Incidentally, the RCS has a bunch of Alerts in its .RSC file, but
doesn't use them, and apparently uses form_alert).

- Holding down the arrow in a scroll bar doesn't cause continuous scrolling
(like on the Mac).  WHY NOT?  This seems like a very obvious thing to do.

- Nothing I've seen except NeoChrome (which throws away the user interface
standard altogether) uses the right mouse button.  The documentation doesn't
talk about it.  In fact, I don't think GEM supports it.  Good thing it's
there, huh?

- A large number of programs (for instance, GEM KERMIT) seem to look for
their resource files (or something) on A:\.  Since I have a hard disk,
I'd really prefer they look on the current default drive.  Also, everything
seems to want to be at root.  Subdirectories are virually useless on this
machine.  And don't create more than 40 of them (well, don't access more
than 40 of them between boots).  As far as I can tell, there's no way
to tell the linker to look anywhere else for the .O files besides root.
You can't append drive or directory specs to the files in the command line,
and there's no option like -I in the preprocessor (CP68), which tells
it to look "at a different drive" (but a directory spec worked there) for
the #include files.  Something tells me Atari didn't develop the software
for this machine on itself.

- Since the desktop is sooooo difficult to use (compared to, say, a Mac),
it would be nice if there were a reasonable CLI.  Is there?  The one I have
(version 0.1) doesn't have a single error message, and no documentation.
So far I can change the directory, ls, and run programs.  Is there a copy 
command?  Pipes?  I/O Redirection?  If I had a good CLI I could just pretend
I've gone back in time and I'm working on a PDP-8 again.  How about a CLI
that launches GEM applications in GEM mode?


In case you're wondering, I'm not too happy with the software on the ST.
It seems like a PC running GEM, not a small Mac.  But, of course, it's
not a PC (although why not, marketingwise, I'll never understand), it has
a 68000.  Running CP/M-68K (essentially).  And GEM/VDI.  And GEM/AES.

MicroEmacs, of course, is great.  But doen't use the mouse (it's not supposed
to).  Why isn't there an editor like Edit (for the Mac) available?

I'm slightly sorry to vent all these complaints, but I see very little to
praise.  What is this machine good for?

Anxiously awaiting any reply,

I remain,

Very annoyed at Atari.

-Eric