Date : Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:04:05 +0100
From : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: BeebEm query
On 28/12/2011 12:43, Alan Williams wrote:
> I think the only thing I did write with it was a Windows 3.11 shell that
> ran in place of program manger and provided a desktop like RISC OS, with
> an icon bar, filer windows and hierarchical pop up menus that you could
> move about.
Cool. Do you still have this around? I think I have an SD card with
W3.11 under DOSbox set up.
> It at least proved that there was no intrinsic technical reason for
> windows UI being as awful as it was and it wasn't actually too hard to
> do at least some of the things that made RISC OS far more usable.
I guess it is the American mindset. I remember Win3 being highly
idiosyncratic in a way that I sometimes struggled to understand.
I did an RSA IT course at night school and drove the poor teacher to
despair - for I would often drop to DOS to do the stuff that the course
expected me to do in Windows. Rename a bunch of .doc files to have a
.txt extension? Simple:
cd \relevant_dir
rename *.doc *.txt
Done.
Or I can fart around forever in the UI. It's the same in XP, probably
every version of Windows ever.
That's not to say that RISC OS is much better for mass renaming, but at
least we can rope around a group of files and set the type of the lot in
one go.
Then there is the issue of the stupid menu bars. I am writing this on an
eeePC 901 with a dinky little 8.9" display. 1024x600. As it is,
Thunderbird writes "To:" and the address, then leaves three blank lines
for other stuff (To, CC, etc) which is annoying as I don't need them
99.9% of the time. Then I lose a further centimetre (or line) with the
menu bar - File, Edit, View, Blah, Blah, Blah. It's a shame Windows
never discovered context-sensitive menus other than (usually)
Cut/Copy/Paste on writeable fields.
Best wishes,
Rick.
--
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...