[openbeos] Re: Tracker icons

  • From: Nathan Whitehorn <nathanw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 09:37:10 -0400

That's the craziest assertion that you have ever made! Least consistant GUI?


Absolutely. Most apps use their own icons. You don't know if it's
CTRL or ALT-[key]. No consistency in the preferences
dialogs/controls. Then shortcomings regarding user input widgets. No
consistent help system. Often bad or incongruent keyboard control.
All that should IMHO be established/determined by the OS, not the
application.

Cntrl or Alt is a system setting. We can't force icons on apps -- *no* operating system requires that my new snazzy app use a system icon. That's just silly. If you're claiming that apps use custom icons for system types, that's just wrong. I don't really see the problem with the help system. If you took issue with the utter lack of a help system in almost any app, yes, that's a problem. But "consistency"... I'm not even sure what you mean. And keyboard control is pretty much the same across apps for standard functionality (close, copy, paste, next control, etc.)

The app developers need something to write for, period. R1 is that base that
they need.


Well, as R1==R5, they can pretty much use R5, not so?

This is the argument I made a couple years ago, but I've given it up, because, as Axel pointed out, R1 > R5. As an example, some Haiku apps that run on R5 (StyledEdit and MDR) require Haiku libraries like libtextencoding. Why? Because they have features, important useability features noticeable by the end-user, that R5 doesn't have. This is true of a lot of the system. The media kit is new and improved, the network stack is utterly different, the kernel has some new APIs (I believe devfs supports attributes and node monitoring now?) The driver API is completely revamped. I could go on, but the point is that we will, from the very beginning have features R5 doesn't have, even in our core APIs, not to much the addition of hardware support in areas R5 didn't even touch (e.g. ACPI)

We also need R1 because some things simply can't be implemented, except in a horribly hacked way, in R5. To use the example of ACPI again, this needs kernel support -- to use it for power off, suspend, etc. This *cannot* be done on R5. But we will be able to do it on Haiku R1.
-Nathan

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