[openbeos] Re: 18 Features Haiku Should Have (but Doesn't)

François Revol wrote:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,145118-page,1-c,windows/article.html
1: useless if you have workspaces. Plus F3 is bad system shortcut (too simple = overrides app's use) 
2: Haiku has it (BeOS had for a decade)
I like using both. For practictal reasons, I never use more than 4 workspaces and they tend to fill with windows pretty quickly... even if I use both the macbook's monitor and an external one :-) 



3: VNC + (s)ftp (+whatever ftp client you want) = $0
4: VNC again = $0
5: cron + tar/zip/... = $0
6: cdrecord ? (even for win32: http://smithii.com/cdrtools )

> 8: you're 2 years late on hypeness. besides a podcast is just an xml
> file + mp3 (which means you must search the mp3 url in the xml file if
> you don't have a podcast client instead of just clicking the mp3 url
> directly, stupid).

Yeah, but wrap it up in a user-friendly fashion is Apple's strong point :-)



7: Zeta has StickIt from LostMarble...
I have an unfinished similar app that uses replicants to attach stickies to the desktop. I may donate it to Haiku.
And it was the first app I made in VB 1.0 in Windows 3.1, and a TSR app in Turbo Pascal for DOS :-) That one never really worked...
9: that's the only good one so far (but even in ubuntu it doesn't always work).
I'm not sure it is so good. It has to be managed, and it never contains the apps you want, or it contains tons os stuff you don't need and becomes hard to navigate. Instead, I suggest an "Update preflet" to which an app can supply the URLs to check for updates. 



10: pure eye candy + cpu waster = useless


1. It uses the GPU.
2. People likes eye candy.
3. THAT'S MY CPU AND WHAT I DO WITH IT IT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS! :-)
4. What do you do with a quad core, anyway?
11: "uncluttered" ? just like everything else it becomes cluttered when you use it too much. Dockbert ? :D
I hate the Dock. It mixes up open apps, closed apps, folders, documents, minimized windows, trash, and hardly it's good for any of them. Now, THAT is only eye candy, of the kind that makes desktop experience worst, not just a cycle sucker. 



12: Haiku's go to ~/ BeOS had that 10 years ago.
So it goes unnoticed. Desktop would be a preferable place. Even better, it shouldn't be hardcoded and the user should be able to choose a different one. 



14: set icon size to max, make window 1 icon large, and scroll down. $0
"max" isn't enough. Cover Flow lets you use the whole screen, and horizontal scrolling is more natural. I was skeptic at first but now I admit it's damn useful.
17: totally biased. I could say just use the terminal, everything has the same font in the terminal, it's much simpler.
That's not the point. Like we were discussing some time ago, it would be useful to have all the common menu items in the same location in all apps, for consistency.
18: BeOS almost has that, apps have resources, + they can be removed by trashing the folder usually.
The same can be said for most Windows apps... the Mac approach is different from a user's point of view.
So, you marked most of these as "eye candy" or "Haiku almost has them". I couldn't disagree more. This sort of stuff makes for a different computing experience than Windows offers, possibly more interesting. How Haiku could be more attractive if it becomes an OS that looks like 10 years ago? I saw people starting to use Linux just to have "something different" and abandoning it because it was, after all, boring and not "that much different from Windows". On the contrary, who gets a Mac is often happy with it. If we understand the difference, we can make Haiku something people will be happy to use.
Nothing of this is for R1, of course. But for R2, Haiku must start to think in bigger ways. 


Regards,

Gabriele

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