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Click Right on with RISC OS

RISC OS 7 Comments

“When asked what they most like about RISC OS, many enthusiasts are likely to mention the fluid, slick and intuitive manner with which user and computer interact. In other words, the graphical user interface, or the GUI as the geeks would have us call it. With RISC OS, the GUI encourages all applications to work in a similar way, and to have the same feel. Faced with new RISC OS software, a user already has a good idea of how to drive it and explore.”

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Thom Holwerda

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7 Comments

  1. 2008-03-25 12:05 am
    snozzberry

    Or will that be the one talking about the latest SkyOS beta?

    • 2008-03-25 12:43 am
      zizban

      ?

    • 2008-03-25 12:04 pm
      RISCOSMike

      What are you going on about?

      • 2008-03-25 1:35 pm
        memson

        1st April – April Fools’ day

    • 2008-03-25 1:02 pm
      Andre Silver Supporter

      What has SkyOS to do with this?

  2. 2008-03-25 1:23 pm
    steve_s

    Whilst it is generally true that RISC OS apps work in a similar manner, the same was true with it’s peer, Apple’s System 6.

    Apple had a clear and well defined style guide for System 6 apps which virtually all applications followed. They defined things such as what menus you could expect to see, and indeed where things would be in those menus.

    Acorn’s RISC OS Style Guide was nowhere near as complete. For example, there are few rules concerning what should be in menus, and as a result menus are largely inconsistent from one application to the next. There was no style guide produced for Arthur (RISC OS 2’s predecessor), and guide for RISC OS 2 was very late, thus it was not included with the initial batch of RISC OS Programmers Reference Manuals. (If memory serves it was about a year after RISC OS 2 came out that the Style Guide was published.) Acorn also took an incredibly long time to update it for RISC OS 3.

    The generally consistent look and feel of RISC OS apps is there because application designers tried to copy the style of Acorn’s inbuilt applications. Even some Acorn produced applications (such as Acorn DTP) did not follow the rules very well themselves. Indeed Computer Concepts (who were probably the most successful RISC OS application producer) ignored almost all of Acorn’s style guidelines.

    Personally I found it much easier moving from one application to another on the Mac than I did on RISC OS. This is in spite of the fact that I used RISC OS every day (and programmed for it) and only used Macs occasionally.

    I’d say that even today RISC OS tends to be no more consistent than Mac OS X. Of course both are light-years ahead of Windows…