“I’m a confirmed RISC OS user, enthusiast, promoter and what some may even say, evangelist. Why did I feel inspired to write this short article and share my views with people? Partly in response to an article and partly because there are a number of rather ignorant, yet arrogant, PC users inhabiting some of the comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroups who love to complain about RISC OS and prosthetalize about how good PC applications are to their RISC OS counterparts – usually without the skill set or experience to make a valid judgement. I’m all for argument, but when people argue through ignorance or though blinkers, I feel like shouting ‘Oi! No!’ in their faces, but instead I’ll settle for writing this article.”
Make this stop…do we really need 3 articles in 14 days on why someone stays with, doesn’t stay with, wants to stay but has a problem with…Risc OS?
Why? It’s literally OS news ;^)
Ok for my part I modded you up because indeed enough is enough but we seem to be minority here..
I rather read those articles about OSes which are somewhat unknown/obscure to the public at large than yet another Linux review where the reviewer doesn’t say anything other than how he installed the damn thing and how pretty it looks. Or worse yet, another Mac worship piece.
I agree but I’d also rather the articles be at least somewhat based in reality. I stopped reading after this: “I can take any image, be it JPEG, PNG or GIF straight from a camera or something like Photoshop on a PC. Simply resave it from RISC OS and immediately it will be smaller and leaner – yet with the same (or even improved) quality.”
Reminds me of Linus’ joke about Linux “We all know Linux is great…it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.”
Gooberslot: have you EVER used a RISC OS machine with a recent version o/t OS?
The odd thing is that jpeg-compression on RISC OS tend to use a very efficient algorithm so that many images compressed to JPEG tend to be smaller on a RISC OS machine than similarly JPEG-compressed on a windows or OSX PC.
Look RISC OS is not an all-singing and dancing magic rabit. The fact is: what it does, it does it good. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s not fancy. It’s an easy to use, efficient OS. It worked very efficient while delivering a high degree of user friendliness. And that’s where its success was.
The same as the left-right-click parent window click that some you reverted in windows terms as “the backspace”-trick. Again you just have to work with RISC OS to appreciate this simple feature. As it not only works with filer-windows (as in windows) but also with application-windows. Again you really have to see it.
It biggest succes was in the early 90’s when RISC OS applications where on par featurewise with their Windows and MAC counterparts. What the RISC OS platform had more back then was: Speed (RISC OS is even today with its modest hardware requirements a speedy OS with fast user-interaction) and The combined cost of the platform plus needed software was cheaper (back then) then their competitors.
SInce then most third party software developpers vanished and/or turned Windows PC (usually for financial reasons). So for it to have some success again it needs more enduser-software. That’s all. Matters are getting worse since the 2 leading parties in controlling the RISC OS platform are arhumenting about OS-features while missing the point. What OS you should be irrellavant to what you want to do with the computer.
Just my 2 cents.
EPDM
I understand that. But really, my issue is that each article is a response to the one before…going all the way back to some guy saying that he is leaving Risc OS. That started what I feel is a completely useless thread of articles saying “I am always going to stay with Risc OS” or “If RiscOS did this…i’d go back”.
I modded your original comment back up, even though I disagree with it.
I was half way though my RISCOS article when the other guy posted his article. So, my article wasn’t a response to his. It’s just co-incidence in combination with the fact that this a period of transition for the OS.
I suspect that there is going to be another bit of RISCOS news posted in the next couple of days regarding movement on the RISC OS Open site.
As other’s have pointed out, this is OSNews. There are other sites that cater more mainstream OSes/IT news.
I don’t care that Risc OS appears on the site. I don’t care that alternative Operating systems get posted news. I love that. It just seems that it’s a threaded argument and really I don’t like articles in response to articles or that seem in response to articles (as yours really does). And now there’s this one in response and it does say it is in response.
I would be complaining if it was an article about why someone loves windows in response to an article about why they are leaving windows…
Your article was unfortunately in the middle of an article/response article war…but this one is part of it.
what i wonder about is that you said RISCOS is so much more responsive and stable, while the other article wrote how unstable and unresponsive it can be… (no pre-emptive multi-threading etc)
Perhaps you are confusing the articles? I didn’t make any claims for superior stability for RISCOS.
As for responsiveness, it depends what you mean. The applications and the OS are light and fast. They’re always in RAM so there are no problems of applications getting swapped out to disk. On the other hand, the multi-tasking is a bit more primitive.
and Why I Always Will
There you have a Zealot: A guy that won’t stop using a given OS no matter how much the OS land changes in the future and no matter how much other OS improve.
RISC OS is virtually indestructible in this sense – mainly because the entire operating system is fixed inside a ROM chip in the computer.
In other words, the OS is “un-corruptable” because your hardware stores the OS in a ROM chip. Fine, except that this isn’t really a OS feature, except in the part that allows the OS startup from a read-only media (linux and windows can also do this)
How little they realise how many man-years of work are wasted around the world by people struggling with Windows
Indeed, there’re so many millions of stupid people out there….
What’s more, RISC OS had things in 1987 which Microsoft and Apple are STILL trying to copy
Believe it or not, RISC OS users have more choice and flexibility in the range of software available than even Microsoft users. Why is this? Because in the past 20 years Microsoft have managed to pretty much kill and destroy innovation, creativity and variety in the computer world.
Mod me down if you want, but this looks a pretty stupid article to me, and I don’t even want to bother to discuss the reasons.
Edited 2006-12-12 19:55
Maybe I’m picking nits, but does the following quote agree with history?
I first started using computers back in 1978, when I learnt BASIC programming on an aged (even then) Commodore PET machine. I then advanced onto early Apple Mac machines before being introduced to the Acorn BBC B in 1982.
I’m pretty sure that the Mac wasn’t introduced until 2 years after he was introduced to the Acorn.
You’re right. And the PET wasn’t “aged” in 1978. The first PET was introduced in 1977.
He probably meant Apple II systems (late 70’s and early 80’s for Europlus II).
To summ up
Apple II was introduced in 1978
Acorn’s BBC model A & B late 1981, early 1982
Apple Mac was introduced in 1984
Atari ST and Amiga 1000 in 1985
Acorn’s Archimedes in 1987
Regards,
EPDM
A large part of my day job is designing web sites and developing perl scripts. The simple answer is that if I couldn’t use RISC OS for this, I’d probably give up and do something else. It’s simply not the kind of thing you can productively do on either Windows or Mac OS X.
ROTFLMAO!
I can code websites productively on either Windows or Mac OS X. The author may not be able to but if I were him I wouldn’t go around ranting about it like it’s the other guys fault.
The author may have found his computing nirvana in RISC OS, most disagree with him, but you know, variety’s the spice of life (or these kinds of boards would be very dull places). 🙂
I’m guessing this guy just needed to rant after RISC OS took a particularly harsh usenet bashing. Move along nothing to see here…
I’m glad to see a bit of comment from the ‘other side’. Last week, I authored an OSNews article called “What It Would Take To Make Me Consider RISCOS Again” and I was hoping that some counter-commentary would pop up. However, I can’t agree with many of the points he raises.
I think I should explain that many RISCOS users suffer from a chemical and physiological condition. In short, their bodies generate an electric field which plays havoc with any computer that doesn’t run RISCOS. Consequently, they are unable to even power up a PC or Mac without it crashing. Obviously, people with a more normal body chemistry are able to expect an uptime of months on end from their Mac, Linux and Windows boxes.
Other points:
Lots of text editors are a bit better than notepad now. Many include syntax highlighting for lots of languages.
RISC existed before the ARM chip.
The fist Arc was powered by an ARM2 (not 3)
Having BASIC built-in is handy for the bit of test code or calculation but it’s hardly a useful RAD environment.
I wouldn’t mind having a look at the source that makes ‘RISCOS designed websites’ and RISCOS compressed JPEGs smaller than ones created on other OSes.
I don’t think that there is a greater choice of apps. I bet that there are more than four document editors for Windows.
I’ll stop there as I don’t want to exceed comment length but my point is that few of his points are valid. Suffice to say that Paul is the personification of the old-school RISCOS ‘enthusiast’ who will never be convinced that anything is as good as RISCOS.
First of all: You might be surprised to see that many RISC OS users have more then sufficient knowledge on a lot more then “just” their RSIC OS boxes. In my own case I have ALL popular OSes at hand (RISC OS 4, OSX 10.4.5, Win Xp and Vista ultimate RC2)… and I am perfectly able to power up these systems without crashing them. I can even install these systems or build the entire PC (inmy own case its my job). I previously owned a Linux-server as well (with years of uptime). So stiop patronising RISC OS users because you disagree with ONE!
Other Points:
Mr. Vigay did mention “other” editors. You obviously missed the line where he mentioned Zeus (http://www.zeusedit.com)
RISC excisted before the ARM chip.
Yeah, doh. He didn’t denied that either. The Archimedes was, however, the FIRST commercially available personal computer with a RISC processor. Ofcourse we could argue that the 68000 back then was also a RISC cpu but come on…
In RISC OS many applications were written in BBC-basic. I remember a real-time 3D modeller/renderer written in basic (Architec). It could even do real-time texture mapping (with textures real-time dragged and dropped from other open applications etc…). Also the BBC Basic variant in the Archimedes and later RISC OS machines was the gateway to its ARM-assembler. This is still a neat feature often neglected (a combined high level and low-level programming interface). This was even more great since the ARM cpu is RISC so the few instructions are quite easy to learn and remember. Anyway the footprint of RISC OS apps is usually ridiculously small (even in its glory days) compared to the others. As for the JPEG compression. Well Mr. Vigay has made a follow-up containing some examples.
As for the suposedly “greater” choice of apps. I totally disagree. We HAD a great choice of apps but that situation is no longer so. As there is a lack of programming effort on that market.
I’ll also stop here. Because in the end you can’t compare Apple’s with Acorn’s (in this case). Especially when you haven’t tasted both of them. I also think that your comment of Mr. Vigay being an old-skool enthousiast. Well maybe he is. So what? I know Mr. Vigay is also an avid Apple user and he’s been in “the business” for a long time. We’re not talking about an senile old man here.
I don’t see much of an argument. What I got:
1. The OS resides in a ROM
2. Fonts are anti-aliased
3. He likes the UI
a. Windows don’t auto-raise on click
b. Drop down menus are full screen length
c. Right clicking close on the filer provides the option to navigate up the directory hiearchy
4. You can poke around with the OS internals
5. There is no dominant software vendor for the platform
I’ll admit that I haven’t used a RISC OS machine, but I don’t see anything on this list that don’t apply to Linux. Point 1 is rare, but if you’re willing to tweak, the linuxbios project can make that happen.
When I think productivity boosts, I think something like Quicksilver for OS X, which has far reaching consequences for just about all desktop activities. I’m sure he has a million shortcuts for doing things faster on RISC OS, but every power user has that on their preferred platform.
Anyway, I loved these quotes:
[T]his impresses clients when they find that a RISC OS designed website is so much faster and sleeker than a PC designed counterpart.
I can take any image, be it JPEG, PNG or GIF straight from a camera or something like Photoshop on a PC. Simply resave it from RISC OS and immediately it will be smaller and leaner – yet with the same (or even improved) quality. (emphasis mine)
[Designing websites is] simply not the kind of thing you can productively do on either Windows or Mac OS X.
Hilarious quotes! The guy who wrote this article must be an absolute idiotic fanboy. Both mac and linux are much better. The RISC OS UI looks like windows 3.1, I cant believe it is a current os. Wake up, the 70’s are over…
The RISC OS UI looks like windows 3.1,
I disagree, I think it’s the number 1 or 2 OS out there for looks.
No, I’m not a RiscOS user.
Yes, I kind of died of ROTFL-itis too.
I hope now the author comes out and explains us how an image not only can actually gain quality, but does it just by being handled by the RISC OS kernel!
And to people that code browsers, stop using that discriminatory SLOW_DOWN_IF_NOT_DESIGNED_ON_RISCOS flag!
But also bordering on the fictional.
Even Apple, only introduced their ‘Dock’ with the arrival of Mac OS X in 2001, and even with the advent of Leopard almost upon us, they’ve still not quite got it right. Acorn’s iconbar worked right from the outset – and it’s still better than the competition nearly 20 years on – an awfully long time in the I.T. world.
Apple’s dock is adapted from NeXTSTEP’s, which debuted some years earlier. Admittedly, a few years after RISC OS (or indeed Arthur), but ‘right’ is a distinct matter of opinion. Given it’s almost troll-worthy, such a reply will suffice: I bet there are more Mac users happy with the OS X dock than there are RISC OS users happy with the Icon Bar.
When I come up with the goods, they’re usually mighty impressed at the speed, especially as they no doubt think I’m struggling with some inferior package like Dreamweaver on a Mac/Wintel box. I smugly laugh to myself, patting my Iyonix ‘secret weapon’.
Uh, what’s the argument here? You can’t use Dreamweaver on RISC OS, so you have to use a leaner HTML editor? Newsflash! Plenty of people on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows don’t use Dreamweaver either. In fact, many use lean HTML editors exactly as you are on RISC OS and are able to test modern eye-catching designs in the target audience’s most popular browsers.
I can take any image, be it JPEG, PNG or GIF straight from a camera or something like Photoshop on a PC. Simply resave it from RISC OS and immediately it will be smaller and leaner – yet with the same (or even improved) quality.
Except there isn’t anything like Photoshop for RISC OS, is there? Not to mention something like Aperture or Lightroom, given we’re talking about taking images straight from cameras. What’s RISC OS’s RAW support like nowadays? And, humour me, how exactly are images saved with improved quality?
You can even save your data exactly where you want to save it – by simply dragging a file icon onto any open disc window – no need to navigate through some restrictive file browser window to find the directory in which you want to save your work
Except those restrictive file browser windows will happily let you enter a full path of where you want to save the files.
However, the RISC OS user interface was designed with minute thought for all those little enhancements that the competition has still failed to implement – such as being able to ‘right-click’ on a filer window close icon in order to close the window and re-open its parent window – so you can navigate through your entire disc collection without cluttering up your screen display and without losing your place half-way down a stack of directories inside other directories.
A bit like pressing ‘Cmd+Up’ in Finder, or ‘Backspace’ on Windows, then?
Believe it or not, RISC OS users have more choice and flexibility in the range of software available than even Microsoft users. Why is this? Because in the past 20 years Microsoft have managed to pretty much kill and destroy innovation, creativity and variety in the computer world. Ten years ago users had a choice of several word processors, different databases and even different spreadsheets. Ask a PC user to name a word processor other than Word and a spreadsheet other than Excel and you’ll probably get a blank expression as if you’d asked them to name the first hundred digits of PI. This is because Microsoft has systematically killed off competition in order to thrust their own offerings on a gullible public – a public that doesn’t seem to know any better than to blindly accept whatever crap Microsoft dish up.
Now this is just apples and oranges. You can’t compare the majority office package on the majority platform with the fact that there are so few users on the minority platform that a majority would be too close to call!
There are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of independent developers producing software for both Windows and Mac OS X (not to mention the myriad open source packages which build pretty much out of the box on OS X and are regularly ported to Windows, but aren’t generally portable to RISC OS, although sterling efforts have been made in this arena). Alternatives to Microsoft Office? In widespread use. Alternatives to Internet Explorer? Also in widespread use (scan the last page of OSnews articles and you’ll note one major one was recently ported to RISC OS on the Iyonix).
Essentially the argument boils down to:
– It’s not Windows
– It doesn’t run Windows software (whether you want to or not)
– It has a few UI niceties that power users (which on a minority platform is most of the user-base, but on a majority platform is a tiny fraction of the user-base) enjoy and don’t exist in quite the same form
– You can ‘tinker’ with the OS (and you can’t do this on other platforms?)
– Your OS ships on a ROM, so… you have to pay a fairly significant amount for all but the most minor of upgrades which get soft-loaded
And, not to forget:
– No pre-emptive multitasking
– (By extension) no multithreading
– No memory protection
– Limited hardware (and driver) availability
– Very little software is ported to the platform
– UI paradigms that are relatively alien to the average PC user
– Archaic filesystem semantics
Sorry Mr Vigay, but I’ve heard less FUD from Steve Ballmer.
Vigay’s off on another planet again, yes, but…
“I bet there are more Mac users happy with the OS X dock than there are RISC OS users happy with the Icon Bar.”
I believe virtually all RISC OS users (plus many ex-users) think that the icon bar is quite a decent innovation (rather than the Icon Bar – a Web site for RISC OS fans – which is also fun in its own way). You’d stop using RISC OS very quickly, even back “in the day”, if you hated it.
I believe virtually all RISC OS users (plus many ex-users) think that the icon bar is quite a decent innovation (rather than the Icon Bar – a Web site for RISC OS fans – which is also fun in its own way). You’d stop using RISC OS very quickly, even back “in the day”, if you hated it.
I was deliberately trolling with that; I meant in terms of sheer numbers, not proportion. I’d not be at all surprised if damned near 100% of RISC OS users were perfectly happy with the icon bar [ignoring prior mistaken miscapitalisation] and only 90% of OS X users like the dock.
Though now I’ve just explained it, it’s not nearly worth the chuckle.
I believe virtually all RISC OS users (plus many ex-users) think that the icon bar is quite a decent innovation (rather than the Icon Bar – a Web site for RISC OS fans – which is also fun in its own way). You’d stop using RISC OS very quickly, even back “in the day”, if you hated it.
Back when I used RISC OS the iconbar was one of my least favourite features. The RISC OS menu system was great, pervasive drag and drop was fantastic, the window management was just perfect, but I always felt that the iconbar was a missed opportunity.
It’s used to display open applications, access application specific menus, and for drag and drop, but unlike the Dock/task bar it can’t be used to switch between applications. Without using a third party utility you have to shuffle through windows by repeatedly using the “send to back” button. I often found this a pain when multitasking, especially when stuck with a low resolution screen.
To me a sub-menu listing open documents seems like an obvious thing to have in the iconbar contextual menus. After all, some application icon menus list recent documents. I’ll never understand why Acorn didn’t add some form of app/window switcher to the otherwise brilliant RISC OS GUI.
Acorn fans may like the Iconbar, but in my experience many of them also run an alt+tab clone, or utility like !Director that can provide a menu of open documents.
Despite that omission, I still think RISC OS has one of the finest user interfaces ever made. In my opinion it’s still better designed and more productive than Windows Vista, any Linux DE, or even Mac OS X.
I know that the individual RISC OS UI features people list don’t seem very impressive today, but it was truly more than the sum of its parts. All the great touches, clever ideas and consistent design added up to provide a great user experience. Modern UI designers could still learn a lot from Acorn.
Unfortunately, like so many other people, I had to leave RISC OS behind as the hardware limitations and lack of software made it impractical for my needs.
I think a lot of people forget the idea of making a UI usable. I mean look at the debate between Vista, MacosX and what Leopard might look like. Who cares? OK it might look nicer but…is it easier to use? How fast does it boot up and switch between apps? You know, the stuff that matters after 5 minutes of actually using it.
As for your remark “there isn’t a photoshop for it”. Well Photoshop itself is not ported no. But there is (or was) a program with similar features. Called photoDesk. That was one o/t major photoretouching apps on that platform. Photodesk could definitly match photoshop featurewise (back then).
Also your remarks.
Why is co-operative MT so bad? If the implementation is good and the apps behave as they should then end-users couldn’t care less if the underlying os is pre-emtive or cooperative multitasking.
Multithreading… oh boy. And you dare to speak about “paradigms that are relatively alien to the average PC user”
As for the limited hardware and drivers. The same is true for Appls’s PC’s (or SUN’s machines for that matter). This is not a problem. If end-users find the combination hard-software okay then why should they bother with all the jack-shit china-crap around.
As for software “ported”. Oh come on. I couldn’t care less if it was “ported” or natively developped. As an example I couldn’t care if I’d use photoshop or photodesk as long as I can do my work the way i want to do it, as efficiently as possible without me hasling around with the underlying OS.
All other items you mention also use a lot of “fashionable” terms which are meaningless for the average PC user (as stated above). Are you also spreading FUD then?
Regards,
EPDM
When I start seeing people go on and on about Windows stability, I know I can pretty much stop paying attention as the author obviously hasn’t used a modern version of Windows. Since Windows NT 4.0, the only issues I have had with stability have been hardware related, and those, few and far between.
This guy complains about the ‘idiots’ who use windows, and then admits he could never do his website design on Windows. Well, there are millions of us Windows ‘idiots’ who manage to use the wealth of web design/editing software available for Windows to enhance our productivity and deliver on time and on budget for our clients and employers. If the author cannot manage this feat on Windows, he either has not tried, or is himself an idiot.
As for his claims of smaller, higher quality JPEGs, I call BS. He might be fooling his clients, but he’s not going to fool anyone who knows better.
What on earth does that mean? To advocate for prosthetic limbs?
people love choices. Especially *their* choices and they will fight to keep them. I don’t agree with his choice but I respect it and I’m glad it’s possible for him to do what he wants on his computer the way he wants it.
“you still can’t get any other computer system out of the box and start programming with absolutely no extra software whatsoever”
I’m not sure that this guy has ever actually used anything else. For example, a Mac or any other *nix box comes with a wealth of programming tools. Even a Windows PC has Windows Scripting Host.
It’s worth noting that actual RISCOS users aren’t all as mad as Paul. The feedback for the article on an actual RISCOS site isn’t exactly flattering.
http://tinyurl.com/yz99ns
(leads to:)
http://www.iconbar.com/articles/The_Vigay_will_never_abandon_RISC_O…
Most of those that replyed to that article are now no longer using RISC OS them selves.
> I can take any image, be it JPEG, PNG or GIF straight from a camera or something like Photoshop on a PC. Simply resave it from RISC OS and immediately it will be smaller and leaner – yet with the same (or even improved) quality. (From the article)
I have nothing bad to say about RISC OS, but this statement is pure fantasy. It’s compressed, but it’s the same quality? No, it’s not. Improved? Changed, perhaps, but “improved” is so subjective as to be laughable.
Having used RISCOS 2 and 3 a lot, I can vouch for how basic and poor an experience it was. I’m not sure how the author can justify and substantiate half the claims he makes.
I’ve used Windows based systems, BeOS based systems (intel and ppc), LINUX systems, MacOS systems (6, 7, 8, 9, X) and AmigaOS as well as RISCOS, and RISCOS was by far the poorest experience, hands down. Poor quality apps, infuriating GUI.
The BASIC was cool at the time, but it lost its charm after becoming acquainted with a real compiler. The thought of using line numbers (IIRC you needed to) and using an immediate interface (ala an Apple ][, C64 or Spectrum) is too, too painful. The basic files were tokenized, so you had the have a special 3rd party app to edit them in a text editor.. HORRIBLE! Not an experience I’d enjoy going back to, not at all.
I for one am someone who despised the Icon bar too, by the way. I also hated the Window stacking.
[edit: oops.. correct my typo]
Edited 2006-12-13 13:29
I’m curious about why you disliked the RISC OS UI so much. I came to RISC OS after happily using Mac OS for several years and to me the RISC OS UI seemed like a massive leap forward. As much of an upgrade from Mac OS as Mac OS was from Windows.
I always liked using Mac OS, but after trying RISC OS it seemed very primitive and basic. It was hard to switch back after getting used to RISC OS advantages like proportional scrollbars, live scrolling, solid window moving/resizing, drag and drop between apps, anti-aliased text, contextual menus, background file copying, etc.
Many of those RISC OS advantages didn’t make their way into the Mac OS UI for the best part of a decade. I find it hard to see how anyone can really argue that Mac OS was more advanced than RISC OS back then.
I always thought it was a shame that the iconbar didn’t let you switch between applications, but on the other hand it did allow you use drag and drop to open files in running apps. That’s something that Mac OS didn’t have at the time, and something that the Windows taskbar still doesn’t support. I can’t see why anyone who’s happy with the taskbar/Dock in Windows/OS X would despise the iconbar, with a few tweaks it would have been near perfect.
As for the window management, I can see why someone would prefer classic Mac style window stacking, where all the windows of an application are kept together, but I don’t see how RISC OS window stacking is so different from BeOS, Mac OS X, or SDI apps in Windows/Linux.
The main difference is that windows don’t have to jump to the front when their menus are activated or when they’re given focus. That could be very useful when using drag and drop to save a file, or transfer data between documents. If you wanted the window to come to the front you just had to remember to left-click the titlebar or scrollbar, rather than clicking within the document. Overall I think RISC OS window management was more versatile than the alternatives, at least once you got used to the differences.
> I’m curious about why you disliked the RISC OS UI so much
RISCOS was the first WIMP GUI I used… this is going back to the days of Arthur and RISCOS 2. A300 series etc. I went to college (English usage, not American) and did A-Levels using them. My parents had an A3000, so I used it exclusively at home too. Then I used AmigaOS. I found it much more to my liking. I then went to Uni and used Windows 3.1 a lot. I didn’t like it as much. But then Windows 95 came along, and I never looked back again. I then got into MacOS 7/8 and then BeOS via a dalliance with LINUX. RISCOS doesn’t favour well in my memory. Even back then it was way too limited. This is all pre internet too.
> I always liked using Mac OS, but after trying RISC
> OS it seemed very primitive and basic
None of those features really amount to anything. They’re all really superficial.
> Many of those RISC OS advantages didn’t make their
> way into the Mac OS UI for the best part of a
> decade. I find it hard to see how anyone can really
> argue that Mac OS was more advanced than RISC OS
> back then.
Depends on the hardware. I’d rather use MacOS 8.1 on a first gen PowerMac than RiscOS 3 on an A5000.
> As for the window management, I can see why someone
> would prefer classic Mac style window stacking,
> where all the windows of an application are kept
> together, but I don’t see how RISC OS window
> stacking is so different from BeOS, Mac OS X, or SDI
> apps in Windows/Linux.
I’m speaking of the way the Z-order works. Mind you, it wasn’t much better on the Amiga thinking about it.
> The main difference is that windows don’t have to
> jump to the front when their menus are activated or
> when they’re given focus
Yes, they should, and that is the problem!
> Overall I think RISC OS window management was more
> versatile than the alternatives, at least once you
> got used to the differences
No, BeOS has the best window management I’ve used.
None of those features really amount to anything. They’re all really superficial.
Absolute nonsense.
Do you really consider not having to wait around doing nothing every time you copy files to be “superficial”?
Do you really think features like contextual menus and drag and drop between applications “don’t amount to anything”?
When you consider that most uses of a computer involve text, are you really claiming that the improved readability provided by anti-aliasing isn’t important?
Even relatively cosmetic features like proportional scrollbars, live scrolling, solid window resizing, etc. made it more pleasant and productive to use.
Individually none of those features may be vital, but all the features I listed improve usability, and added together they put RISC OS far ahead of Mac OS or Windows.
Would you really want to go back to an OS without those features today?
If all those features are so unimportant, it seems a little strange that the developers of other GUIs such as Mac OS eventually bothered to implement them (usually with much fanfare).
Depends on the hardware. I’d rather use MacOS 8.1 on a first gen PowerMac than RiscOS 3 on an A5000.
You’re comparing an OS released in 1998 and hardware from 1994, with an OS and computer released at the start of the decade. It’s not surprising that Mac OS would have caught up (at least in some ways) 8 years later. A more reasonable comparison (based on release date and price) would be between RISC OS 2 on an A400 and System 6 on a 68020 Mac II, or RISC OS 3 on an A5000 and System 7 on a 68030 Mac.
I’m speaking of the way the Z-order works. Mind you, it wasn’t much better on the Amiga thinking about it.
I’m not exactly sure why you have such a problem with RISC OS Z-order, it worked fine in my opinion.
To me it seems ironic that you’re making a big deal about an individual issue like this, while dismissing out of hand all of the RISC OS features I listed, many of which were well ahead of their time.
Yes, they should, and that is the problem!
Why? Do you feel RISC OS should work like that simply because most other GUIs do? In my opinion that’s not a good reason.
I get the fact that you didn’t like it, but that doesn’t automatically make it a problem.
Being able to access an application’s menus without bringing it to the front was often very useful. It worked brilliantly in conjunction with the pervasive drag and drop in RISC OS.
For example, a large document could be filling the screen, yet you could still bring a directory, or another document to the front, then use drag and drop to save/transfer a selection from the background document. You’d have to resize/rearrange the windows so that they were side by side if RISC OS windows jumped to the front.
RISC OS window management takes some getting used to if you’re used to other GUIs, but it can be very versatile and improve productivity when working with multiple windows. When building a DTP document using data from a couple of different graphics packages and a word processor for example.
Doing the same task in Mac OS would require much more inelegant window shuffling. I always felt like I had one hand tied behind my back when I had to work on a Mac or PC. In my opinion no other GUI compares with RISC OS for window management, not even BeOS or Mac OS X come close.
I still miss the elegance of RISC OS and would definitely use it in preference to Vista/Mac OS X if it ran the apps I need.
> > The main difference is that windows don’t have to
> > jump to the front when their menus are activated
> > or when they’re given focus
> Yes, they should, and that is the problem!
They “should”? The “all windows jump to the front” phenomenon is merely a hangover from the single tasking original Macintosh and subsequent iterations of that design up until System 7 (which, if I remember correctly, had co-operative multitasking but retained the user interface limitations). No amount of special effects in Mac OS X makes that an elegant design feature.
I’m no fan of RISC OS any more, but Mac users are probably the least entitled of all people to lecture anyone about either user interface design principles (here comes Fitt’s law for the nth time) or zealotry (“but if Steve says DRM is great it must be so!”), even though the referenced article was full of the latter.
Hi Memson,
You have the excact opposite experience than I have 🙂
I used to do professional DTP work (in Belgium this was mainly Mac-based) and I’ve also used many Mac OS classic and PC systems. In fact I was an avid Amigoid (or how do you call Amiga zealots 😉 ) before I bought my first Acorn (The A5000). In fact it was the horrible transition of Windows 3.0 to 32-bit Windows 3.1 that drove me to that A5000. I must say that was the best computing experience in my live. The A5000 was blistering fast. It could do anything I wanted without crashing. And those apps where just amazing (besides amazingly cheap). Artworks was teriffic compared to the hell of Coreldraw that I was in and illustrator…my god, you can’t imagine how I hated that Powermac 8100.Impression publisher was such a joy while Quark Xpress just drove me mad (and all that in a meager 4MB of RAM).
1992 was the by far the best year for me. Especially since I just stumbled on that Archimedes thing which I couldn’t care less about. Untill I played with one. I got hooked immediatly.
As for that third party app to edit BASIC-files? Eh? You had !edit which was build in and which handled Basic fine (and later on you had Zap or StrongED). Why would you need anything else 😉
I find it very refreshing to read more about RISC OS.
Thanks go out to the article writers, and to OS News.
/2 cents
…the taskbar.
The taskbar did not occur in Windows95 for the first time in Windows.
The first Windows to have a taskbar was Windows 1.00 – before Risc OS got it.
It was removed in Windows 2.0 and got a comeback in Win95.
This article is sheer propaganda, and I cannot take it seriously.
I doubt the author has any serious background or experience with the operating systems he so easily and repeatedly bashes.
It seems that he has come overboard to also include complete nonsense in this article.
Oh well, to each his own.
Anyone who stays with RiscOS forever is a Luddite.
Feels good to get it off my chest…
That’s the kind of words that came to my mind when reading this piece of zealotry. I don’t think articles of such unbelievable low quality should even get mentioned at OSNews.
Reminds me of my old days as an Amiga zealot… but hey, i was twelve years old then. I hope the “author” of this work of art is not much older than that or he might have some serious mental problems.
When programs are written correctly, the OS is stable (same as any OS, of course).
The responsiveness comes from the fact that usually within a fraction of a second of making an input all the resources of the computer are working to respond to that action. If you want your current background task (e.g. compiling a system, transferring a file, etc.) to complete as soon as possible, simply don’t ask the computer to do anything else; if you know you are in for a wait, then you might want to read osnews.com, and your browser will scroll down just as quickly during the mamoth task as without it and so the computer doesn’t keep *you* waiting.
Of course, in absolute terms, the background task will take longer to complete because it cannot “steal” resources from other processes, but because of that the other processes are always ready to respond to you as quickly as possible. It depends whether you’re more irritated by a one minute task taking five seconds longer, or your browser window taking a half a second longer to re-draw. (The numbers are completely made up, btw.)
Don’t insult me and and every other competent web designer that has actually studied and understands the language of design, typography, photography etc.
I see the quality graphics and web pages you can produce with your Risc OS apps:
http://www.vigay.com/
Class, sheer class 😉 I like the links in the web portfolio section, very 1987… a bit like Risc OS.
Come on man, get over your obsession. I loved Risc OS as much as the next man, the GUI was amazing, the programs so small and fast, but there are now much better and fast alternatives even if they are CISC.