@madtrekker

you made me remember one thing why I am an Amigan.

The retry button.
I rarely (perhaps never) am able to do retry on mainstream SW, when something goes wrong. Most painfull it is if in the middle of some time consuming process you can not do retry, but need to restart the whole thing again. Perhaps because of Amiga's floppy legacy, the retry option became natural & essential. For example when I did backup on my 68k Amiga, I could simply retry in the middle of the process, if some floppy was found broken. On win95 I had to restart the whole process.
Backing up a PC took one work day longer, because every floppy had to be tested before starting the process, and even then the process was unsure.
Also, this kind of things make me consider Amiga as the most reliable environment (there's thousand of reliability matters beside memory protection).

(in these matters I believe MOS and AOS should be equally good)

Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 08:19 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 08:19 AM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@madtrekker

Quote:

Here's an example, imho, it's 2011 and WB doesn't have a back button

The functionality is there, it just requires a bit of a keyboard-usage.

http://www.gregdonner.org/os35faq/keyboardshortcuts.html

IIRC these worked with a plain OS3.1 installation too, so the functionality should be there in OS4 too.

@madtrekker

so basically you hate your directory lister to have navigation buttons? i remember it annoyed me the first time too. does ambient have this feautre? i guess so.. a small hint to the mos team then: remove all these premium features and former amiga users will easier accept you as legitimate followup alternative.

Last edited by wawa on 31-Oct-2011 at 08:22 AM.

@KimmoK

Quote:

The retry button.

dumb thing is that it rarely achives anything. why should it once something failed. to be honest the popping up unneccessary requesters is one of these "features" i mostly get mad on amiga.

@wawa

Navigation buttons can be disabled. It will look like that: http://twitpic.com/33nyzd

@Korni

maybe there should be a special mos distro aimed at former amiga users, with all that stuff disabled as default. im not even joking,

@wawa

As said several times in this thread, Ambient can be downgraded to Workbench mode if wanted. That's only a checkmark to disable browser mode, and an advanced option to disable icon autosorting in the views (the desktop view has always "manual" sorting).

Here's a couple pictures to illustrate:

Spatial mode:






Browser mode:






And something definitely lacking in workbench (which makes it a nightmare to use):



Or integrated xad/iso archive browsing:



And that's just a small example of what ambient is able to do, while still retaining old WB concepts if really wanted. But I'd really like to know what makes spatial mode so pleasant, though. Can someone elaborate on its advantages (and because old workbench worked that way is not what i expect as answer here).

@wawa

Maybe, it doesn't really to be a distro, only few config files. It's all down to personal taste. One former/current/anything Amiga user can like it, other don't. This is why you can customize MorphOS or any other Amiga family system a lot. I wouldn't like to disable everything :).

@wawa

Quote:

wawa wrote: @Korni maybe there should be a special mos distro aimed at former amiga users, with all that stuff disabled as default. im not even joking,

Since it's all configureable It may be a thing to assemble a prefs file to isnstall to cope with the interests of conservative users. Well, what would be in that prefs file?
- diabled browser mode, instead the spatial mode
- more classic inspired theme
- non unified prefs (it's configurable)

What's more?

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@Fab

In spatial mode, you can group icons according to your own taste and preferences, allowing also to immediately "visually" recognize the "most preferred" icons.

Icons listed in a tight equidistance can look unclear.

nexus


P.S. See it as with "tags" vs "categories" to organize items (of any kind). Tags are an unstructured and flat way to organize items (as spatial arrangement of icons) but works pretty well for social networks. (Actually, I'd like to see how usefull a non-hierarchical filesystem using tags would work ;) )

P.P.S As with your Browser-Mode example for System:Utilities, I'd like e.g. having arranged the Editor, More and Multiview Icons next to each other as they are thematically related.

Last edited by nexus on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:27 AM.
Last edited by nexus on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:23 AM.
Last edited by nexus on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:23 AM.

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@wawa

"dumb thing is that it rarely achives anything. why should it once something failed. "

it gives user a chance to fix the problem and retry, without starting all aover again.
(swap a working floppy/CD/DVD, make more space on the HDD, etc etc... saves huge amounts of time when compared to restart again and again)

"to be honest the popping up unneccessary requesters is one of these "features" i mostly get mad on amiga. "

I get mad when the os pops up some insane message and one can only click OK (wtf, it's not "OK") a la windows.
Also I get mad when OS fails without any message, a la linux. (mainly it's applications disappearing without any sign of what happened)

@nexus
"In spatial mode, you can group icons according to your own taste and preferences, allowing also to immediately "visually" recognize the "most preferred" icons. "

I love that too ! Also I use to group icons on folders according work tasks at hand. Too bad that most OSs do not have that working at all. if they have similar feature, it resets every time your screen resolution changes etc.

For example for prefs folder/drawer I prefer to group the icons to my liking. (but I admit that prefs is an area where many people prefer simpler organization of settings)

Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:45 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:40 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:38 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:36 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:35 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:31 AM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@nexus

Ok, but what you refer to is more the icon sorting algorithm here, not the spatial/browser mode.

And as you can see in the last screenshot (showing magicwb archive), you can have browser mode with non automatically sorted icons.

@madtrekker

Now I get it - Hyperion doesn't update Workbench at a purpose. It's a brilliant and truly ingenious idea - why hurry with new, easy to use Workbench when it's not what people want? They come back looking for the Workbench they left, not for some easy to use, intuitive desktop (yuck!).

I don't think MorphOS devs wanted to catch with "other OS", maybe they just liked how Directory Opus performs on "our OS" (ver 5.5 is from 1996, so it predates Win98- ouch!).

@recedent
Quote:

maybe they just liked how Directory Opus performs on "our OS" (ver 5.5 is from 1996

As I already stated elsewhere, I never liked the DOpus Magellan approach of organising things. I even "re-configured" it to look like DOpus4.

One of the first things I thought on my first steps with Ambient was something like "Oh no, it's like Magellan..."... Fab is of course right - someone can reconfigure it to look/behave like Workbench. Actually there are some functions in Ambient that would be nice to have in Wokrbench, too. Nevertheless I would not be happy if any future Workbench will be an Ambient copy.

Quote:

new, easy to use Workbench

New: yes. Easy to use? No. I find it kind of funny that some people think that they can define what's easy and what's not easy to use. *I* am the only instance who decides what's easy! (For myself, of course)

Spatial mode: I want the parent drawer to stay open! This is by the way the same kind of behaviour you might find with Risc OS desktops. I'm still totally f****d up by all those "browser mode" crap I have to obey all day while using Windows and the like...

@KimmoK

Quote:

I love that too !

And me too!

Last edited by cha05e90 on 31-Oct-2011 at 12:18 PM.

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@Fab

It's not only sorting, but more the visual identification of "groups of icons" at the first glance.

However, I agree, that this is not always necessary or useful. For workbench, I arrange iconst only for often accessed directories and simply sort icons for other directories or use the list mode if there are a lot of files. I'm even sometimes annoyed about the spatial arrangement of icons for new/fresh extracted archives. To have the choice is therefore the best, I think. As you have shown, with MorphOS you have the choice. That's good. To my personal taste, I would like to have spatial arrangement as default and only when extracting archives to RAM:, I'd would go for browser mode as default :)

regards,
nexus

P.S. Spatial arrangement of icons also helps to identify temporary/current data which is of special interest. You can simple move unwanted icons to a corner and keep currently important one in the center (without the need from actually moving the data to subdirectories).

Last edited by nexus on 31-Oct-2011 at 12:21 PM.

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@cha05e90

Quote:

Spatial mode: I want the parent drawer to stay open! This is by the way the same kind of behaviour you might find with Risc OS desktops. I'm still totally f****d up by all those "browser mode" crap I have to obey all day while using Windows and the like...

In fact, it really depends on usage patterns, which is why there are both modes.

However, i think you get the best of both world in browser mode, if you keep in mind you can still open a drawer in a new window by pressing ALT key or using contextmenu -> open in a new window.

In spatial mode, pressing ALT will close the parent window (like in workbench, i guess), but it's not as practical (jumping windows effect).

Last edited by Fab on 31-Oct-2011 at 12:27 PM.

@Fab

"But I'd really like to know what makes spatial mode so pleasant, though. Can someone elaborate on its advantages (and because old workbench worked that way is not what i expect as answer here)."

It just feels natural to me. I don't know if I can be sure if that's because it works with the way I'm trying to interact with the filesystem, or if the way that I interact with the filesystem evolved based around the methods that were available at the time when I learned how to use computers.

I've never used DirOpus, but I did use to use DiskManager for heavy duty file operations where using Workbench was a little clunky. I find I actually use it less on Amiga OS4 though.

I tend to snapshot windows to specific positions so that as you open them you get a cascade of overlapping windows. This makes it very easy to navigate back to any earlier level, and I like that you can pull a window out to a new position to make it easier to work with two windows side-by-side without losing it's snapshot position. Downside is that it takes a lot of effort to set-up so it's probably something most people wouldn't bother with, but I find it works for me.

I could live with auto-align to grid, as I tend to do that anyway (and most icons these days come in a standard size) although the ability to specify the order that icons appear in, is something I miss when forced to use Windows.

If MorphOS can be set-up to do all of this (and it sounds like it can) then that's great. None of this had anything to do with why I personally ended up using OS4, but I could see why it might put off users more familiar with Workbench if the defaults are based around a more modern DOpus-like experience. It presumably wouldn't be too hard to have the installer offer a choice of default settings?

@wawa

"so basically you hate your directory lister to have navigation buttons? i remember it annoyed me the first time too."

Well it certainly was one of the things that annoyed me at the time. I guess it was annoying because I actually quite like the original Win 95 Explorer. It's so long ago though that the navigation buttons (and using single window by default) are the only things that really stick in my memory. There might have been some other stuff too. Generally each version of Windows takes away (or hides) some features I really liked and replaces them with something aimed more at novice users.

The navigation buttons were certainly irritating as they got in the way and took up quite a lot of screen space. I think they've made them smaller since (and of course monitors are higher resolution), so it's probably not the issue it once was, or maybe I've come to terms with it, but certainly when I switched to OS4 it felt like I'd come home.

@Fab

Quote:

In fact, it really depends on usage patterns, which is why there are both modes.

Of course! In the meantime I'm used to Ambient or configured it the way I like (or got used to the corresponding shortcuts). But I must admit that is was configuration work and learning curve (not that steep, indeed....).

Nevertheless: I'm with Nexus - the spatial mode, especially the traditional Workbench one - can be very, very useful. And I see by reading nexus post, there are other people who seem to use the "desktop" like I do...

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Come on, shouldn't Amiga users enjoy tinkering stuff and going through the settings for their taste? We aren't any Mac/Windows users using default themes. I don't know any two Amiga users having similar (or at least default) setup on their systems. We love options and that is what MorphOS gives. Go through all settings and make conclusions then. There isn't any need for separate distros.

And I don't quite understand people telling that there only should be spatial mode and still they fall back to external file manager all the time. Why there shouldn't be those filemanager functions optionally available in the main UI for the quicker use? Back button seems to be fine in Dopus/Filemaster/etc?

Here's also one older example of Ambient windows features showing setting for the spatial mode too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIg27n6hQPM

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