ebert@arisia.Xerox.COM (Robert Ebert) (12/20/89)
In article <987@biar.UUCP> trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) writes: >Apple took the original ideas of the GUI developed at Xerox and radically >improved them, as anyone who has used the Xerox interface and the Mac can >tell you. In all honesty, Apple should be paying a license fee, same as >the rest. But let's be fair; Apple did more than any other company to >popularize and promote GUI's, and Macs are still the easiest to use machine >around; check out the statistics on training costs sometime. For all the >talk about User Interfaces, Apple was the first company to preach about >offering a consistant UI across all programs, and attempt to enforce it. >should stop proselytizing. We have enough Jihads going on the world >already. Hear hear! A calm, rational, and apparently correct opinion. Whew! At the risk of starting a religious war, I'd like to comment on some of the interface discussion that's been going on here. Any opinions I state here are absolutely, positively MINE, and not those of my employer. I've been a Mac fan for a long time (Mac II, then SE/30 owner) and I've used a lot of other 'windowing' machines in a university environment and at work. Currently I use a Xerox 6085 running ViewPoint, a Sun 4/110 running X11 (prefered to SunTools) and a Mac SE/30 (at home). Apple certainly did do a lot to popularize the GUI concept. Namely, they made a (relatively) cheap machine that used it. Interface design decisions aside, Apple was the ONLY player in the under $10000 full time bitmapped display market 5 years ago, when people we discovering how useful a bitmapped display could be. Now both companies (Xerox and Apple) have changed, as has the marketplace. The original Star interface (now in ViewPoint form) is still around, as is the Macintosh interface. There's also a host of other GUI products running on just about every machine there is. Bit mapped displays are here to stay. (Thank god!) Now, for some specifics. (Re: the Xerox ViewPoint UI) * Printers do indeed appear on the desktop. You print by selecting an icon, hitting COPY (a 'function' key) and bugging (clicking on) the printer. You can also OPEN (or double-click) the printer and find out the status of your print jobs. * There is no such thing as dragging. You select an object, press COPY or MOVE, and select a destination. Under some applications, you can hold down the mouse button at the destination for fine-positioning. * There is no 'menu bar' on the desktop. There's an 'attention menu' which pops up over an 'attention window' at the top of the screen. System messages go to the attention window (rather than through Dialog boxes) * Each window has a control bar which is also a menu bar. (Sorta like McSink for the Macintosh) * The ViewPoint UI uses a 2 button mouse. In general, the left button is 'select' and the right button is 'extend selection' (shift-click on the Mac.) Chording produces pop-up menus where apropriate. Well, I could go on and on... the current Xerox UI is different from the (old) Star UI, and it's not really what the suit is about. Here are some more gross generalizations. I like the way the Mac does color. (Or rather, I like the fact that it's easy to do color on the Mac) No other machine does it as neatly or as cheaply at the moment. The Mac's price (though unnaturaly high) is still great for what it gives you. (Relative to any other bitmapped, windowed, mouse-driven machine...) I like the way XWindows works over UNIX. I like UNIX. (I was weaned on UNIX... what can I say?) No other windowing systems works as well over UNIX as X. That's about it's only strong point, however. I *love* programming on Xerox machines. It's SO easy, relative to the Mac or UNIX, at least. You get a nifty language like MESA (sort like Modula 2) coupled with a really nice (windowed!) development environment plus a really sweet debugger. There are lots of Real Programmers(tm) at Xerox, but the nice thing is you can read, understand, and even debug their code. (For the record, the internals of code is what brought me to Xerox, Apple's learning curve is way too steep... and besides, Apple hiring procedures are pretty flaky.) I still use my Mac for personal stuff, running a terminal program, writing letters (with MS Word) and financial stuff... and games, too... but I just can't stand programming it any more. I still use my Sun for internet access and the occasional C hack, but I prefer programming the Xerox machine. What I'd like to see, of course, is a blend of all three. Sorry, NeXT ain't it (IMHO). Maybe someday... --Bob