henry@rochester.UUCP (10/13/85)
From: Henry Kautz <henry> Some more amiga/mac comparisons, from a longtime mac owner, after playing with the amiga at the computer store: 1. The amiga software does not support fonts directly, or anything like the mac/imagewriter ability to mix various fonts and graphics. You can draw pretty color pictures, but forget about seeing them on paper (yet). Forget (probably forever) about being able to install different fonts in different system disks, etc. 2. Textcraft, although lacking fonts, does have a very important feature, that a LOT of first-time users will love. It has the ability to create document types (from a fixed list). In a document, you can fill in property sheets, which appear in dialog boxes. For example, when you create a term paper, it will first let you fill in the name, date, course, etc, and then let you add entries to a bibliographic table. Only the body of text itself is entered directed as in Macwrite. Thus you have a combination of a document and a database. This feature was borrowed (and simplified) from the Xerox Star. The Star lets you include computed fields in property sheets, and lets you create new arbitrary sheets, thus combining a word processing document, database, and spreadsheet. In any case, SOMEBODY should write a program like this for the Mac!! (WHY aren't people writing word processors for the mac, when text is what the little off-white box does Best????) For students, I suspect the automatic bibliography feature is much more important than multiple font sizes and styles. 3. Textcraft does use some honest-to-god pull-down menus. Ooopps, is that a lawyer knocking? 4. The 625x200 resolution of the amiga, for text, s**ks. The 400 line mode does NOT work with any text-based software. In any case, the 400 line mode is useless. We are not talking about a little flicker, like when you look at the mac screen at a angle. We are talking major t.v. station off-the-air static, buzzing colors you can stand for about 1 nanosecond before going blind. The other customers were eating it up: "Gee, neat animation!" The salesman was insisting that it was TECHNICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to build a better color display. Hey, doesn't the new IBM extended-graphics card do 350 lines in color? Oh, well, why bother wasting your breath... 5. The current voice-synthesizer software doesn't sound any better than Smoothtalker on the mac. 6. The supposed super-duper-color-animation (Robotcity) was considerably slower and cruder than arcade-video game animation. The best-looking animation in the store was not even running on the Amiga, but was the "walking robot" that runs on the Atari 1030, (!) 7. No flames, please....
bjorn@dataioDataio.UUCP (Bjorn Benson) (10/16/85)
In article <12292@rochester.UUCP> henry@rochester.UUCP writes: >Some more amiga/mac comparisons, from a longtime mac owner, after >playing with the amiga at the computer store: Well it showed. >Forget (probably forever)... > ...625x200 resolution of the amiga, for text, s**ks. The 400 line... >...t.v. station off-the-air static, buzzing colors you can stand for... > ...Oh, well, why bother >wasting your breath... >7. No flames, please.... Heh, that's neat about the net isn't it? You can write derogatory postings with words like "s**ks" and then hide in anonymity. Bjorn Benson
oleg@birtch.UUCP (Oleg Kiselev x268) (10/18/85)
> From: Henry Kautz <henry> > 5. The current voice-synthesizer software doesn't sound any better > than Smoothtalker on the mac. That is because it is the same program, written by the same people... BTW, one of the guys who wrote that voice synthesizer for both Mac and Amiga claims Amiga is a much better machine for programming than Mac, and Commodore is a more pleasant company to work with than Apple. -- -----------------------------------+ With deep indifference, "I disbelieve an army of invisible | Oleg Kiselev. mind-flayers!" | DISCLAIMER: "OK. They are *still* not there." | I don't know what I am talking about and -----------------------------------+ therefore am not responsible for any damages to people who take me seriously! ...!trwrb!felix!birtch!oleg ...!{ihnp4|randvax}!ucla-cs!uclapic!oac6!oleg Nothing I ever say reflects the views or opinions of my employers. They knew who they hired though!