The Amiga. A platform with a history. Today, we are reviewing Amiga Forever, which was kindly provided by Cloanto, its manufacturer. The question I tried to answer during the usage of Amiga Forever was: does it have anything to offer to OS enthousiasts today? Of course Amiga Forever offers great functionality for Amiga fans, but what about the rest of us? Can Amiga Forever cater to more people than just Amiga fans?
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Member since:"Edges and corners are your best friends when it comes to speed and usability."
Not quite. Pie menus are far quicker to select from than edges and screen corners.
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/62
Member since:2005-07-10
On AmigaOS (and the old MacOS) you *always* know that by pressing the right mouse button and hammering to the top of the screen you find the menu.
AmigaOS takes great advantage of Fitt's law: In the top of the screen, you have the menus, the dragbar and the screen change button. Using Fitt's law on menus coupled with this:
MagicMenu is a nice add-on if you prefer to have context-like menus (and context menus are one of the best things Windows has added to the computing world).
means that AmigaOS by standard doesn't use context menus at all. They are always at the top of the screen, or in the Magic Menu case, right at the mouse cursor.
Alternative GUI systems for AmigaOS have added actual context menus though, but this is not standardized and will actually collide with the normal functionality of for example Magic Menu.
Another thing that adheres to Fitt's law in OS1.0 - 3.9 (can be optionally turned off in OS4) is that windows can't leave the edge of the screen. They are always inside the desktop space. If you hammer a window to the far right side of the screen, it'll stop when hitting its right edge, instead of going partially invisible.
This makes it way easier to resize windows that fit between screen edges, using ordinary resizing and moving, rather than having special maximize buttons to do that. You can't accidentally move windows off screen.
Member since:
How does right clicking to reach a menu mean anything speed-wise? In fact the Amiga solution is usability-wise far superior to e.g. the Windows solution of embedded menus (you always have to look for where the menus you really want are located inside the MDI-structure). On AmigaOS (and the old MacOS) you *always* know that by pressing the right mouse button and hammering to the top of the screen you find the menu. That's the way usability experts have been touting for years - and one of the things that have been critizised in OS X since the application menu changes in size and it's harder to immediately guess how far to the right you need to go.
MagicMenu is a nice add-on if you prefer to have context-like menus (and context menus are one of the best things Windows has added to the computing world), but when it comes to raw speed it takes about the same time to pick the item you want in MagicMenu as it does to go to the top of the screen and find it (because it's easier to predict the exact location of it).
Edges and corners are your best friends when it comes to speed and usability.