::scr saving

[Paul Mison]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 12:27:46PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> It was bought up a few months ago in a discussion with some of my
> friends that the whole idea of having to hit Save in applications is
> stupid and a throwback to stupider days.
> 
> At first I argued, probably out of reactionaryism, but now I'm not so
> sure ...
> 
> thoughts?

Those of you who've seen me enough in real life will know I talk about
the Two Great Lost OSes of the 90s now. One's BeOS, and the reason for
that has come up in the last thread or so. The other is Risc OS (and I'm
not sure I've got the capitalisation or spacing right there, but I'm
sure someone will tell me).

When I first came across Risc OS on the Acorns at Anglia, it really
confused me; this was probably because I hadn't been exposed to enough
GUIs at the time. In particular, there was this strange mouse with too
many buttons, and no apps had menubars, and to save stuff you didn't get
a dialog box.

Of course, now I can see that that's all part of the same cunningness:

* All the menus are contextual, and all are accessible without keyboard
  messing
* When you save, you're presented with an icon of the file to drag
  to another app in the task list [0] or to an open folder [1]

the latter being the important one for this discussion. So there's at
least one way to implement saving without dialog boxes (the Risc OS
way).

There were probably other good things about Risc OS (their task bar
seemed vaguely logical, and packaged !Apps seem to have their advocates)
but other people who know what they're talking about might want to leap
in here.

[0] Never did find the proper name for this
[1] It used to annoy me you couldn't drop files on a folder such that
    they would end up saved into that folder. No, you had to open it 
    first.

    Again, I can see the rationale for this now, even if it would still
    annoy me.

-- 
:: paul
:: the future has been and gone