The topic says it all, boys and girl(s) - are the AmigaOS programs of 2012 as good as they can be? Cast your vote now and vent your opinions in the AmigaWorld.net forum.

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@Petah

I think that overall most programs work reasonably closely to the style guides, though there are always exceptions - not using the versioning system being a pet peeve of mine, and there are a good few applications which lack an ARexx port or only have minimal ARexx support, which limits their usefulness.

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@Petah

Mind you, I have not read the RKRM Styleguide, but have read excerpts on the internet about user interface design. (Amazingly, I've found that there are some college courses that still reference the Commodore Styleguide for further reading in their syllabi.) There are certain things that I do not believe make for an easy to use interface. One of those things is the overuse of tabs. Compare GUI preferences with just about any other preferences in the prefs drawer. GUI prefs is not very user friendly. In all fairness, though, the more complex the program, the harder it will be to use. GUI prefs is complex, but could it be made more styleguide compliant, or, if it is styleguide compliant, user-friendly?

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@PhantomInterrogative

GUI prefs is a nightmare! Of half the topics listed I haven't got a clue as to what it is about. So I picked things up once I had my A1200 up and running and moved them over to the µ with the intention to never alter anything (or at least as little as possible) for fear of loosing track and maybe even sanity.

YOU opened the can of worms, sir!

OldFart

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@Petah

Are you thinking of setting up the Amiga Style Police Squad?

When there is a gain in using ARexx in an application, I surely think the author will add it.

Some apps don't use HintInfo. My stance: use it! It's darn easy to implement and allows for a lot of very nice tricks, making a GUI and the info it contains that much better to grasp.

Myself I'm still looking for a way to have a window close itself and reopen again after prefs have been changed, allowing the prefs to become applied to that window. In general documentation (AutoDocs) I still find a bit lacking in many respects. When you know what it is about, the docs are clear enough, but if you haven't got a clue in the firstplace, then you're ressembling a monkey peeking in a rusty old whatch without getting any wiser.

There's now a new initiative of contributing to documentation and i think it is a huge step forward.

OldFart

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@PhantomInterrogative

Tabs in preference programs do get a little annoying; I agree. They can never really fully explain what the tab will reveal and they tend to be a hindrance rather than a help.

Tabs are okay when they are tied to a particular purpose rather than being a loose grouping of items that need to be fitted somewhere. In settings requestors I quite often find myself clicking on several tabs until I find what it is I'm actually after and I'm probably not alone. I'm guessing you might find this too.

The tabs in web browsers tend to be fine because each tab represents a page we want to refer to for a particular reason. Also, as an example, if the tabs were for accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash book, etc., it would probably be fine as we immediately know what they are. Even spreadsheets with tabs we tend to name the pages (well some of us) with a purpose related name; so we tend to be able to find what we want; rather than guessing.

@PhantomInterrogative

I am writing my Thesis regarding GUI and kids. Can you please provide me with a reference regarding the Commodore Style guide? I would very curious to study it, if possible :)

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@OldFart
Quote:

Some apps don't use HintInfo. My stance: use it! It's darn easy to implement and allows for a lot of very nice tricks, making a GUI and the info it contains that much better to grasp.

Agreed. Take a look at AISS; there are hundreds (thousands?) of possible gadget images. Who can remember what each represents. At the very least a program should have an HTML file showing the gadget images with a short description of what function each image represents. Isn't it ironic that after centuries of perfecting effecient alphabetic writing we are reverting to pictographic hieroglyphics on our computers. The television networks should start a new game show called "Name That Image" based on the icon images used in today's programs

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@Xenic

Yeah! HintInfo, or ShortHelp as it's called in MUI is something many programs lack, but it is so very helpful, and as you say, especially for those relying on an image only.

I don't decode icons very easily for some reason. I have to think and and have to do some form of relation database lookup in my head it feels like. Text is so much easier, it just goes straight in - the info is right there while and icon has to be parsed.

But my vote went to stack usage since I believe too many programs are lazy and define large arrays globally which gets allocated on the stack, and to fix the crashes they add a huge stack cookie several megabytes larger than needed instead of just allocate anything above a few kilos on the heap instead and make the program live with the default 64k.

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@Petah

At first I thought you were asking if the actual AmigaOS developers write Amiga style guide compliant code! As if you were detecting a bit of hypocrisy in their code.

What I hate is:

Disorganised file structure with files all over the place or in one place that messes up your RAM Disk.

Litle or no documentation.

No icons for programs that need them.

No GUI for programs that should have them.

No installer for programs that are more complicated than a simple drag and drop. If you can code C you can easy write an AmigaDOS script.

Programs that depend on a host of others that are either not included or need to be tracked down over the internet. In the worse case these other programs would be in ther same state with the all the problems listed above.

Last edited by Hypex on 19-Jun-2012 at 03:06 PM.

@Cool_amigaN

References
-----------------
General reference (including C=Amiga Style Guide):
http://hcibib.org/readings.html]http://hcibib.org/readings.html

http://goodtools.net/pages/SUNstyle/recr5.htm

http://academic.missouriwestern.edu/phriso/art388/pdf/reading/principles.pdf


References to Amiga User Interface Style Guide:
The original Intuition Style Guide http://amigarealm.whdownload.com/archives/manuals/Amiga%20Intuition%20Reference%20Manual-ENG.pdf

RKRM 1991 Style Guidehttp://www.worldcat.org/title/amiga-user-interface-style-guide/oclc/22764567&referer=brief_results


AROS UI Style Guide:
http://aros-exec.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=24171

http://aros.sourceforge.net/documentation/developers/ui.php

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@Hypex

Quote:

No installer for programs that are more complicated than a simple drag and drop. If you can code C you can easy write an AmigaDOS script.

You can easily write an Installer script, that should read. Use the standard tool, especially in a thread referring to standards.

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@Petah

Right, I think there are two themes here. The first is coded from the ground up, Amiga native applications, designed for the Amiga. These tend to implement the spirit of the Amiga Style Guide (I say spirit, because personally I've never seen a copy of it), with a "Project" menu, ARexx port if necessary, ReadArgs-style parsing on the command line, DataTypes loading and anything else we expect.

The second type are ports from other operating systems. These are often incredibly lazy, rarely make any effort whatsoever with using Amiga features or complying to any Amiga style guidelines, and sometimes don't even come with icons (even the default "tool" icon is apparently too much to ask).

There are some excellent ports out there, which have been ported over to the Amiga with care and use the Amiga's features (Qt is a recent example, and rare in that it can make lazy ports look like they've been written with the Amiga in mind, to an extent). The problem is that when you get into this territory, you are basically writing an Amiga native application which happens to use some open-source code. Even something which looks like a "lazy port" under my definition, can be a massive amount of work (I'm thinking of Timberwolf - and I really must stress that I recognise the amount of work that has gone in and would rather not call it "lazy", but in terms of complying to any hypothetical style guide, it is - at the moment, at least)

So, in conclusion - Amiga developers do comply to the Amiga style guide, unless they are porting something from another OS, in which case the portability is often (and sometimes necessarily) put before adding or changing code to make it comply to the style guide.

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@Hypex
If you can write C you can make an installer in C right
I use AmigaDOS scripts but think forgotten a few things like how I ask for input strings, and validate the input’s, I think I will make an installer in C whit nice GUI when update Excalibur next time.

@Chris_Y:
AmigaDOS scripts where pretty standard in 1980’s to 1990’s, I never distributed my programs in 80 and 90’s, and never got the time to lean YAPL (yet another program language.)

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@thread

Its not just documentation though.

documentation can be automated in code, so can help support bubbles.
autogenerate a list of gadgets created and add bubble text array

fill in the data and feed it to the application

We dont have reusable code modules or libraries as a html example.

open source HTML engine (from firefox) as html engine.

Then this Open source code module could be reused to make Amiga style programs that use the HTML engine.

Or one could use the HTML engine as a datatype streamer, so all apps can edit/create/view html.

or even a HTML engine datatype streamer with Arexx/Python/perl support for automated html edit/creation tasks.

Why cant we 'feed' Arexx/Python/Perl/LUA commands to a universal script parser.

So all applications could have 'universal script' support.

eg send Python script to any app to interface:

script="Python"
startscript
name = raw_input('What is your name?\n')
print 'Hi, %s.' % name
endscript

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Installer has been standard since about 1991. It's a lot easier to write an installer in Installer with a friendly user interface, than it is to do the same in AmigaDOS. It handles all the common installation scenarios that require additional work if you are just writing a DOS script. It's these sorts of problem it was designed to overcome and it does what it does pretty well.

Don't write installation scripts with AmigaDOS, use Installer.

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@Chris_Y

To see an excellent example look at the installer script for VIncEd. Thomas' effort there was/is admirable.

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I miss the most consistent look and feel of the OS and apps.

@OldFart
Quote:

Myself I'm still looking for a way to have a window close itself and reopen again after prefs have been changed, allowing the prefs to become applied to that window.

Check the StartScreenNotifyTags() documentation and have a look at the DigiClock source code on OS4Depot for an example.
Basically you can set some bits to wait for, like:

NotifyMe = StartScreenNotifyTags(
   SNA_PubName, PubScreen, 
   SNA_MsgPort, SNotifyMP, 
   SNA_Notify, SNOTIFY_BEFORE_CLOSESCREEN | SNOTIFY_BEFORE_CLOSEWB,
   TAG_END );

NotifyMe = StartScreenNotifyTags(
    SNA_PubName, PubScreen,
    SNA_MsgPort, SNotifyMP,
    SNA_Notify, SNOTIFY_AFTER_OPENSCREEN | SNOTIFY_AFTER_OPENWB,
    TAG_END );

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@Chris_Y

Use Installer... but I rewrote the installation script for ImageFX4.5 in AmigaDOS, because Installer didn't like OS4.x!? (this is tongue in cheek. I know the Installer used for IFX was the OS3.9 version)

In all seriousness, if I were to rewrite the ImageFX installation script using Installer, I would want a good tutorial from which to learn how to write said script.

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