To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
I'm guessing pretty much the same thing the greater OSS community does with Symbian or GEM... (or maybe, at best, with Allegiance or Warzone 2100 - just two "closed -> OSS" games I'm familiar with; the first one from Microsoft, BTW)
...not so much what happens with Blender, id game engines, Star Office, or Mozilla (hm, maybe some pattern emerges here, maybe closed -> open OS have a harder time for some reason; I think the biggest success of such is Solaris, and this one's still a bit 50/50; now that I think about it, id engines are a bit similar - sure, fun tech, used here and there for nice things, but relatively limited overall impact)
So many people say that, yet it still to this day had GUI features non existent in todays OSes (Mac, Windows, Linux etc.)
Yes, I was part of Team OS/2, yes I got my gold pin of excellence, and yes I did extensive demos of the OS/2 Warp GUI at various computer shows.
A famous demo I loved to do (one of many). Drag a fax template onto the desktop to start a fax document. Double click to open and edit the fax. Open the Address Book app and drag a name from there and drop it on the fax document icon. The fax number is now extracted and attached to the fax document (this is show via an attached business card on the icon too). Drag the fax document and drop it on the Modem icon. My fax is sent! That's an Object Oriented desktop, that is true drag-and-drop support. Still no existing OS, other that OS/2, can do this.
It's such a pity IBM screwed OS/2.
But then, there are so many examples of superior software that didn't make it - simply due to a crap marketing team.
Well, it is your darling from the younger years, after all...
OTOH, some nice features here and there could be found in almost everything; and OS/2 was sort of a bit of a turd, too (like pretty much everything back then)
This example you gave - I always hated with a passion (like many, I think; maybe most?) dragging UI paradigms, especially in times of old ball mouses, always clogging themselves in the worst possible moment (and even now, in times of optical, I really prefer to avoid such).
RISC OS also had it similarly irritating (actually it almost depended on drag'n'drop, only later releases reintroduced more "normal" approaches - by popular demand, I believe). It's IMHO a bad way to set up things - two precise actions at the same time, with one hand, and if it gets interrupted the results are a bit unpredictable (who knows where you'll drop the grabbed thing); justifiably underutilized (something close does seem decent on touchscreens of today - that's where the biggest progress is happening now BTW, and it's something from which OS/2 is even more disconnected)
Anyway, we have the rather nice NT part of that past chapter (and Windows element got decent)






Member since:
2005-07-08
OS/2 was nice, but its time is long gone.