Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2740 mails)
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Re: [opensuse] KDE3-4 did teams change?
- From: Rodney Baker <rodney.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:49:08 +1030
- Message-id: <200812100749.33864.rodney.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Wednesday 10 December 2008 06:00:12 John Andersen wrote:
Not much. The original GUI on the Apple II had a memory footprint of something
like 64kB!!!
There is one thing that I do miss from the days of running OS/2 with its
Presentation Manager (akin to X) and the Workplace Shell (the "window
manager"). It had a really neat feature that (I think, from memory) was called
a "Workspace Folder". I can't exactly remember if that was the right term
(Felix might know). If you defined a folder (on the desktop) as a Workspace
folder, any documents you dropped links to into that folder would
automatically open in the last state that you worked on in the correct
applications.
This was great if you had specific documents or files that you worked with on
a regular basis e.g. a spreadsheet, database, text files, word processor
documents etc. Rather than finding and opening each file or application
individually, you just opened the workspace folder and everything in it opened
up to where you left of last time you used them.
The idea was to move the desktop from being application-centric to document-
or workflow-centric.
I'm not aware of anything similar on any other desktop system (there might be,
but I haven't come across it anywhere else). For business users particularly,
I think that would be something worth working on for KDE4.x.
No, its not a new idea - IBM did it 20 years ago - but it was a good one that
never really got noticed due to OS/2's failure to gain market penetration (and
I'm *not* going to enter into a philosophical debate about the reasons for
that...).
--
===================================================
Rodney Baker VK5ZTV
rodney.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx
===================================================
[...]
1) What do you see in the current crop of desktops that reminds you
of 1988. (Windows version 2 vintage), and which is in need of change?
Not much. The original GUI on the Apple II had a memory footprint of something
like 64kB!!!
2) What, other than the aforementioned multi-media, do we do on
computers today that we did not do 10, 15, or 20 years ago that
requires something other than a rehash?
Generally something that works (such as the basic concept of
different applications running in "windows" on a desktop) tend to
hang around until it no longer works well, or some new invention
arrives that allows a different approach.
I've not seen much of either.
There is one thing that I do miss from the days of running OS/2 with its
Presentation Manager (akin to X) and the Workplace Shell (the "window
manager"). It had a really neat feature that (I think, from memory) was called
a "Workspace Folder". I can't exactly remember if that was the right term
(Felix might know). If you defined a folder (on the desktop) as a Workspace
folder, any documents you dropped links to into that folder would
automatically open in the last state that you worked on in the correct
applications.
This was great if you had specific documents or files that you worked with on
a regular basis e.g. a spreadsheet, database, text files, word processor
documents etc. Rather than finding and opening each file or application
individually, you just opened the workspace folder and everything in it opened
up to where you left of last time you used them.
The idea was to move the desktop from being application-centric to document-
or workflow-centric.
I'm not aware of anything similar on any other desktop system (there might be,
but I haven't come across it anywhere else). For business users particularly,
I think that would be something worth working on for KDE4.x.
No, its not a new idea - IBM did it 20 years ago - but it was a good one that
never really got noticed due to OS/2's failure to gain market penetration (and
I'm *not* going to enter into a philosophical debate about the reasons for
that...).
--
===================================================
Rodney Baker VK5ZTV
rodney.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx
===================================================
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