salzman%gaucho@RAND.ORG (Isaac) (12/20/89)
> From: crdgw1!crdgw1.ge.com!barnett@uunet.uu.net (Bruce Barnett) >> Perhaps they are promoting OpenLook instead of Open Windows. oh they are definitely trying to promote OpenLook. but my understanding is that they are supposed to be promoting Open Windows as well. >> OpenLook has nothing to do with operating systems or toolkits. >> You can have OpenLook on a PC, Mac, OS/2, Amiga, VMS system. correct. and having a SunView implementation, along with an XView and tNt implementation is proof of that concept. that's good for Open Look's sake. but.... Sun talks about moving their windowing platform to X11/NeWS, which is supposed to be the windowing platform for AT&T SVR4 as well. i view it this way. *most* USERS (which excludes readers of this list) don't understand the benefits of a network based window system. they just want their terminal emulator, etc. they don't care about SunView vs. X11 vs. NeWS. developers do for technical reasons. marketting people love things like X11 because standards are a great way to sell a product these days. i don't see incentive for a lot of Sun installations to get the move on to Open Windows if they continue to create neet things like the calendar manager for SunView. i would've produced an X11/NeWS version first - or only, for that matter. it just doesn't make sense to me to keep building new tools for a system that's not going to be supported in the future. i'd love to see an X11/NeWS based sun write/paint/draw as well. when is sun going to COMMIT to windowing platform. Open Look is great. i think it should be promoted, even under SunView. but running Open Windows is more important to me. having a network based window system is more more important to me. i think it is to a lot of people. that has a greater impact on how i do my work than Open Look right now. there are a lot of X11 clients i use. at the same time, i want to get more into working with NeWS and doing interesting things with graphical user interfaces. >> The real goal is to have the same user interface on every computer, >> not just on Unix workstations running the X window system. >> >> Remember the analogy of dashboards - you can get inside any car and >> drive it away. No so with computers. >> a real STANDARD user interface for computers is a long time commin'. my personal belief is that it will never come. if it does, it's not going to be just Open Look or just Motif. forget that. a computer is too general of a tool to try and standardize the way you interact with it. you can come close. you can define some sort of standards for various classes of applications, but no one's going to come up with the one "look and feel" and the one toolkit that will allow someone to build ANY application with an appropriate user interface. i like the analogy of UI's versus cars. many others have used it and i've used it myself. they are like cars in that they are a form of transportation (in a wierd sort of way). they get you where you need to go - in your application. but like cars, everybody's got their own style and preference. some people like Porsche's, some like Camaro's, some like VW's. the approach people are taking with UI standardization is like forcing everyone to drive a VW. what is standardized about a car are the basic concepts of operation: a steering wheel, a brake pedal, gas pedal, a dash board, etc., not what they look like. with a UI, some of that has pretty much been settled. you've got buttons and pull down menus, etc. those things pretty much work the same in everyone's toolkit. there should be some flexibility in determining how these things look, to the degree that you know that what you're looking at is a button or a pull down menu. but to try and force the world to make all applications look the same is rediculous. one thing that Open Look addresses is how applications communicate with one and other. filemgr is great. you can drag a document from filemgr onto the textsw of textedit - and bingo, you're file appears. that's nice! i think standardization of UI's will really start to happen when i can drag a document from filemgr onto the text window of a Motif application and have the same thing happen. the concepts and the way in which communication happens - both between the human and computer and the applications to one and other, need to be defined. then we'll have standard UI's. i'm wondering why this hasn't happened yet. this stuff just isn't new anymore. i first used an Alto (roughly) 13 years ago..... >> >i bet if >> >they gutted the SunView compatibility it's performance would improve >> >DRAMATICALLY!! >> >> It might be true - as a lot of code is in the kernel. >> Removing 100K from the kernal would give you the equivalent to >> 1 Meg in user space, since you can page in the code you need. >> >> But I don't really understand your comment about "it's performance". >> what is "it"? The server? The application? The window manager? i mean the server's performance - "xnews". someone else commented that they didn't think it would make any difference. and i don't think memory utilization's the only issue. i'm running on a color (no lego) 16meg SS1. X10 on a color 8meg 4/110 is still faster - or as fast (from what i recollect). that may be a horrible example. i've talked to people that have seen NeWS 0.4 (or some pre-1.0 version). they said it ran faster than anything they'd used before, including SunView - on a 3/50. it was a pure NeWS server - no SunView support. but i gather marketting insisted on putting SunView support into NeWS - and that's when the performance dropped. maybe someone in Sun would care to comment on that? i have no empirical evidence of my own. but i get the feeling that removing SunView support and really tunning the server for the various frame buffers would make it run like a bat out of hell. >> The real problem is that you may end up using three or more toolkits >> that are not sharing any code. SunView, XView, tNt, plus the other X toolkits. >> >> Each toolkit has it's advantages. But using all three at once does eat >> up a lot of memory. again, i'm talking about the server. i've got lots of memory. X11 on our HP 350's (or whatever the model number is -- 68020 based machines with ~4meg) still performs better in terms of rendering and moving windows around. >> >most of Sun's SunView tools have XView equivalents. >> >> As of today, I doubt this. There are a LOT of SunView programs out >> there. Catalyst, etc. A year from now you may be right. i should've been more specific. i'm talking primarily about Sun's desktop applications. if you've got some special app, run it using overview (or something similar). encourage the catalyst vendors to switch over to Open Windows. but why should they do it if Sun hasn't even committed themselves to it?? [NOTE: these opinions are solely my own and do not in any way represent the opinions of the organization i am employed by] -- * Isaac J. 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