dwallach@soda.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Wallach) (11/29/90)
NeXT was on campus today, and I got to play with a beta NeXTstation running some beta version of 2.0. (BTW: They also had a NeXTstation Color which was pretty slick looking. Still too many windows are B&W instead of color, though. Food for thought...) (For those who care, the salesman claimed if I ordered now, I could probably have a NeXTstation by January or a NeXTstation Color by April (!) He says this after touting the special deal Steve Jobs has running with the CEO of Motorolla. His pseudo-official stance on the deliveries: "You get what you pay for." Sounds like customer service to me.) As I drove down deeper into some of the programs, I found rather strange inconsistencies and oddnesses. Some things were just indicative of a Beta release of the operating system (the system performance monitoring program had these big "Not implemented yet" banners splayed across some of the meters...) and others made me wonder just what's in this thing. I'd like to know if some of the following stuff is really only just Beta wierdness, or if they actually released software that works sooo wierd. In Terminal, you can change some of the defaults for a current window (like font) and have them reflected immediately. You can change other things (like reversevideo) and they won't do anything until you open a new window (but you still get the original font, not the changed one). Does this sound right to you? Under one of the menus (maybe the one with font controls in it) you can ask for page layout, and can select page dimensions and all this other great stuff. You select it, say "Ok" and nothing happens. Sure, none of this makes much sense for a terminal program, but then why have it in there? I found that running many of the ApplicationPrograms (AllWithFunnyNames) from the terminal would tend to give me lots of lines of garbage relating to not being able to find this that or the other class. The program would then pop up as usual. Is this normal behavior? Also, if I just ran the program without backgrounding it, and went back to the terminal, I couldn't ^C the program (it just printed ^C) and I had to ^\ it to make it go away. When playing with the digital oscilliscope, and the spectrum analyzer, there was this consistent peak that happened around, oh, 1KHz, even with the micro- phone unplugged (yes, it was in MIC mode). Bug in the program, or the hardware? There appeared to be no way to ditch the click-to-focus nastiness in the Preferences thing. Can you get follow-focus (ala twm)? Well, that's about it for half an hour of messing around. Don't get me wrong, though. I was solidly impressed with the machine. Interface Builder is a definite cool thing. I'm told Sun has such a thing brewing inside which is of the same caliber, but then anything that isn't finished yet is inheritently better than what's out :-) As a whole, I'm pretty impressed, but it's just all the nitty-gritty details, some of which work just fine in X, and some of which you wouldn't even consider doing in X, that concern me. Some hardware fussing: The keyboard feel is a little odd, but I guess you can get used to it. The little NeXT logo in the mouse was kinda irritating on my hand. I think having the volume and brightness controls on the keyboard is awfully cute, but completely useless. Funny, the NeXTstation Color doesn't have any extra keyboard buttons for Degaussing or Gun Alignment or anything, jeez :-) At least the monitor's a Sony. They didn't actually have any of the 2.88Meg floppies around, so I didn't get to find out if you get a real filesystem on the thing or if it works brain dammaged like a Sparcstation (with special hacked tar and eject commands). I asked how you'd go about scanning something. My campus rep said that when he last had to, he did it on a Mac and ftp'ed over the file. Nobody knew if you can use those cheap $100 hand-scanners that are available for PC's. That's about all. Tell me what you think! Dan Wallach dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu P.S. I did get this cool T-shirt with the NeXT logo. Aren't I special :-)
scott@next-5.gac.edu (Scott Hess) (11/30/90)
In article <1990Nov29.015347.24007@agate.berkeley.edu> dwallach@soda.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Wallach) writes:
In Terminal, you can change some of the defaults for a current window
(like font) and have them reflected immediately. You can change other
things (like reversevideo) and they won't do anything until you open a
new window (but you still get the original font, not the changed one).
Does this sound right to you? Under one of the menus (maybe the one
with font controls in it) you can ask for page layout, and can select
page dimensions and all this other great stuff. You select it, say
"Ok" and nothing happens. Sure, none of this makes much sense for a
terminal program, but then why have it in there?
Well, theone set of stuff is Preferences, which has come to mean Defaults
in the NeXT world at large. That means that it modifies the defaults
database, and thus doesn't affect the current status of the program.
Page Layout is for printing only.
I found that running many of the ApplicationPrograms (AllWithFunnyNames)
from the terminal would tend to give me lots of lines of garbage relating
to not being able to find this that or the other class. The program would
then pop up as usual. Is this normal behavior? Also, if I just ran the
program without backgrounding it, and went back to the terminal, I couldn't
^C the program (it just printed ^C) and I had to ^\ it to make it go away.
You cannot ctrl-c break an app in 1.0, either. Presumably this is a
feature. You can ctrl-z and ctrl-\ fine, because those are non-maskable.
There appeared to be no way to ditch the click-to-focus nastiness in the
Preferences thing. Can you get follow-focus (ala twm)?
Couldn't before, why expect it now?
Well, that's about it for half an hour of messing around. Don't get me
wrong, though. I was solidly impressed with the machine. Interface Builder
is a definite cool thing. I'm told Sun has such a thing brewing inside
which is of the same caliber, but then anything that isn't finished yet
is inheritently better than what's out :-) As a whole, I'm pretty impressed,
but it's just all the nitty-gritty details, some of which work just fine
in X, and some of which you wouldn't even consider doing in X, that
concern me.
Well, unless they are implementing an object-oriented library of stuff
to implement the interface, I'm not waiting with bated breath :-)
InterfaceBuilder is not the secret to NeXT's sucess, but is only
a part of it.
The keyboard feel is a little odd, but I guess you can get used to it.
Well, I think you're the first person I've heard who doesn't want to buy
one for their own computer as soon as they sit down at it. Now if only
it had tilt feet.
I think having the volume and brightness controls on the keyboard is
awfully cute, but completely useless.
You obviously don't have a custom system beep. Becomes quite conveinient
when your crashin-beaker beep blows you through the wall :-)
Well, maybe you aren't a current NeXT user? I'm not sure from your
posting . . .
--
scott hess
scott@gac.edu
Independent NeXT Developer (Stuart)
GAC Undergrad (Horrid. Simply Horrid. I mean the work!)
<I still speak for nobody>