Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Jul 2012 02:27 UTC
Good news for Raspberry Pi owners (ha!): the RISC OS port is progressing along nicely. So much so, in fact, that a Raspberry Pi-based RISC OS machine is in the works. Stable beta release of RISC OS for the Pi planned for September!
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Member since:2005-07-06
I'd agree with you that RISC OS has a fantastic user interface. When it was released it was far ahead of its time, making Mac OS and Windows look hopelessly primitive in comparison. In my opinion it's still much more elegant and productive than Windows, Mac OS X, or any Linux GUI.
I don't know... if that were really the case, wouldn't ROX Desktop (inspired by and quite close to RISC OS GUI) see more uptake, more enthusiasm about it? (at least among the Commonwealth *nix users, much more likely exposed to RISC OS in the past) Meanwhile, it mostly just languishes.
Personally, while I think RISC OS UI is charming in some ways (and I imagine such perceptions could easily be stronger in its heyday, in the early days of GUIs), it's also a bit awkward and chaotic (chaotic good, I suppose
- in the style of those http://www.kyon.pl/img/18666.html comparisons; the individual in this one perhaps fitting better than is usually the case... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Waldemar_Fydrych ). So, I love the cursor function where it shows if "wait for 2nd click in double-click" is still active (I believe that would really ease things for the people I've trained in GUI use, over the years). But OTOH its insistence on drag & drop (which, in turn, tends to cause headaches for GUI and mouse novices) was misplaced IMHO, especially in the times of permanently-clogged ball mouses - which, additionally, was usually most severe in public (like, educational...) settings.
Member since:2011-04-27
Features
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/08/13 14:22 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/24/13 22:24 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/18/13 11:21 UTC
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2005-11-16
I'd agree with you that RISC OS has a fantastic user interface. When it was released it was far ahead of its time, making Mac OS and Windows look hopelessly primitive in comparison. In my opinion it's still much more elegant and productive than Windows, Mac OS X, or any Linux GUI.
Having said that, the underlying OS really is showing its age. It was decent enough back when it was competing with Mac System 7 and Windows 3.1, and it's certainly lightning fast, but we're no longer using computers with 25Mhz CPUs and 1Mb RAM. It's usable, in the same way that Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 are still usable, but it's very much an OS of the past, not the future.