Re: Thoughts on Nautilus

[Paul Seelig <pseelig mail uni-mainz de>]

jsight@mindspring.com (Jesse D. Sightler) writes:

> Actually, many people (myself included) consider the Windows98 style to
> be a very intuitve and comfortable system.  Of course it can be done
> better, but that shouldn't prevent us from using many of their ideas
> which have clearly been succesfull.  One needs only look at the current
> information on MacOS X to see the success of many of the features
> inspired by Win98.  Of course, the Mac people did it better, and hopeful
> the Nautilus dev group will ultimate improve even upon it.
> 
Just to put things straight:

Win9x heavily derives from GUI concepts implemented at the beginning
of the 90's (my NeXTSTEP-3.2 stems from 1993), which means *years*
before the first release of Win9x.  Have a look at the NeXTSTEP-GUI
and you'll understand: "http://www3.pair.com/mccarthy/nextstep/".

MacOS X heavily builds upon it's NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP heritage and can be
almost considered it's successor if it weren't for the additionally
included MacOS pre-X compatibility layer of the former Apple OS.

I've just recently installed NeXTSTEP-3.3 again and i'm really
astonished about the degree of useability there already was in 1993/4
and actually *is* when compared to those cheap copies.  No, it's IMHO
definitely not perfect[1] (far too much mousing required) but would
serve as a great base to depart from.  Especially considering the code
base provided by GNUstep, from which one could borrow a piece or two.

                                   Cheers, P. *8^)

[1] I don't believe in the perfect GUI anyway because this tends to be
    heavily depending on the task and the particular user.  But Win9x 
    was in certain regards (filemanager vs. explorer, desktop icons) a 
    big step backwards.
-- 
   ------------ Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de> -------------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------