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From: keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Software Development
Message-ID: <1769@cadovax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Sep-87 13:00:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: cadovax.1769
Posted: Fri Sep 25 13:00:22 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Sep-87 07:41:53 EDT
References: <872@percival.UUCP> <3878@well.UUCP> <1263@dasys1.UUCP> <1751@cadovax.UUCP> <800@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle)
Distribution: na
Organization: Contel Business Systems, Torrance, CA
Lines: 34
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.amiga:8770 comp.sys.atari.st:5310

In article <800@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>> This will probably be less true as soon as the Amiga port of GEM is
>> available.
>Isn't this rather like porting curses to the Mac? 

Yeah, I'd say so.

>I mean, Intuition
>is the standard user interface on the Amiga... and it's important to
>stick to it. Now, a subroutine library that allows you to make GEM
>calls but uses Intuition... that I could see. But sticking the GEM
>user interface on the users is going to (1) hurt sales to non-naive
>users, and (2) hurt the naive users who buy the package anyway.

Sure, sure, but when faced with the prospect of porting a GEM application
to Intuition, (I've looked at it, and we're talking some major rewrite here) 
many developers will decide it's too much work and just stick to the Atari.  
GEM on the Amiga, silly as it sounds at first, provides an almost 
immediate new market for Atari developers with little effort expended on
their part.  And GEM is a completely portable windowing system, DESIGNED 
to be ported around.  TOS weirdnesses and ill-behaved talk-directly-to-hardware
applications present some interesting challenges, but allowing Atari
developers to spend a little time hacking 5% of the code is a lot more
palatable than spending a lot of time hacking 70% of the code.  It could
make the difference between a lot of applications migrating, and almost
none migrating at all.

And hell, it just opens up it's own screen so you can still multitask at
the same time.   Not 'sticking' the GEM interface on the users is
only going to 1) hurt the Amiga sales of Atari developers, and 2) hurt
Amiga users who would like to have Atari packages.  Cad-3D anyone?

Keith Doyle
#  {ucbvax,decvax}!trwrb!cadovax!keithd  Contel Business Systems 213-323-8170