Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!fish.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely From: jgreely@fish.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Next and the competition Keywords: it's here! Message-ID: <29866@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 21 Dec 88 10:04:55 GMT References: <2405@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <19728@ames.arc.nasa.gov> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: THE Ohio State University, CIS Dept. Lines: 129 In article <19728@ames.arc.nasa.gov> mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Mike Smithwick) writes: > It is really slick!! Well, sort of. I've been playing with our first NeXT for about six hours now, and while I may call *parts* of it slick, other parts are driving me nuts. 1) I *hate* click-to-type. This may be a religious issue, but I just don't like it. 2) The keyboard is not tiltable. Ours may grow rubber feet soon, if it stays in its current location. >"Slick" is a technical term meaning, boffo, neato, keen, etc. A combination >of elegance, fun and grace. "Slick" is frequently replaced by "Beta", so far. "Gee, that's a nice idea; pity it doesn't work. Real Slick/Beta." >NeXTSTeP is beautiful. Beauty is skin-deep, and I think nextstep has warts. I don't like the near-useless dock (for *lots* of reasons), the beta-beta inconsistency of the user interface (yes, this is promised to be fixed in 0.9, but it's really annoying *now*), the "intuitive" nature of many window operations (how many of our Mac/X/NeWS/ Suntools people sat down and scratched their heads over "features" in the windowing system? I think we'll need to take a poll), and some *real* features in icon handling. >Haven't played with the Interface Builder, but it looked good. Haven't had time. I've been busily playing "dumb-user", and managed to go five hours before looking for (fortunately useless) paper documentation. We've got three pages of changes, bugs, suggestions, and gripes already, with lots more to follow (many of them to do with the online documentation, which is in the "sorta" stage). >One small detail I don't remember anyone mentioning before about the >window motions. When you move a window, you MOVE a window. Not just an >outline of the thing, but the entire window. So? This can range from convenient to visually distracting, to screwy when an application doesn't know how to handle refreshes properly. >There is a flight simulator that comes with the box. It's called "Stealth", >and makes very nice use of NextStep. The performance can't match >Interceptor, or the other high-speed Amiga programs. Our licensed pilot played with it for a while, and I'm sure he'll be able to give a better impression of this than I can. Bob? >Display PS is much faster than I'd expected. Still, on this release, screen >writing speed seemed rather pokey on a line demo they have. The Amiga >still shines on this account. Which demo? Most screen handling is quite speedy (that I've seen). The longest redraws I've found were playing with background screens (bitmaps in postscript? yeah, that might be sluggish, depending on how they're stored). >Another couple of little things I liked that give the box character is >the error feedback when you log on and make a mistake. The screen is dark, >and a login box appears in the center. Make a mistake on the password >and the box jitters back and forth for a fraction of a second like someone >hit it with a hammer. Cute, but this falls into the category of "minor touches". There are a lot of these, some good, some bad, some hype. > Then there >is the Digital Webster error requestor if it can't find a word. I only >got a quick glipse over someone's shoulder, but it appeared to have >a silhouette of a little man giving you a raspberry. Cute. The >"Are you Sure?" requestor has the little man shrugging his shoulders and >speading his hands. Various programs use different icons, but a lot are like these (frequently, the same icon is used for a different purpose in different apps; more "fixed in 0.9", from the docs). I have great hope that these will not be 1.0 icons, or they might not stay that way here. Cute is relative, and wears of quickly. >The Digital Librarian is impressive. We searched for the word "celestial" >throughout the works of Shakespeare. It found all 3 entries in what appeared >to be less than 5 seconds. Wow. Try opening the first act of "The Merchant of Venice". Not quite as intuitive, is it? Which documents are stored under "Release notes"? And why do we get a browser rather than a nice scrolling index? Advice for the budding NeXT user: 1) whenever anything goes wrong, just repeat "beta, beta, beta" until the headache goes away. 2) Set up a local newsgroup/mailing list with all of the interested parties communicating. There are enough rough spots that it's nice to have one place to send them to local users (and by all means, send the actual bugs/suggestions to NeXT; things won;t get fixed unless they're pointed out). 3) don't let in the masses until the guru-types have had a chance to figure out how to get it sensible (sendmail, yp, NFS mounts, and other administrative nonsense). Note: if the above comments sound too negative, I'm forced to point out that I haven't logged into my sun since before noon, and while I may not be delirious, I don't hate it, either. Now, if we could only get WriteNow to print onto a non-NeXT laser printer, and have open apps on the dock look different from closed, docked apps, and build a terminal generator app, and slip an "abort" into the browser so you can log out before it finishes sorting the contents of /usr/spool/news/talk/bizarre (or other random large directory that you've opened), and (yeah!) run without NextStep, so I can have a giant vt100 (well, maybe I'm getting carried away now). For fun, type "cd /;cd ..;cd .." into a terminal or shell window, and watch it vanish. Interesting, no? -=- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely) "Give him some orange juice and a sugar cookie, ... maybe a tetanus shot. He'll be fine."