Posted by msephton 2 days ago
I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
"Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file.""
OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.
Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.
And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.
It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
> I still can't figure out what problem the "Adjust" button solves. It's semi-analogous to CTRL + Left-click on modern systems
Yes, that sort of thing. I think I most often used Adjust to open directories/files while closing the previous one, rather than leaving a trail of open windows.
Or, Adjust-clicking entries in menus and keeping the menu open.
Or, selecting multiple files/directories in the Filer to move/copy/open multiple files at once.
> Double-click "Select" on an application icon to launch it and... nothing. Its icon displays in the Icon Bar, and that's it.
This is the procedure described by the RISC OS Style Guide [1], the UX guide for programmers. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why.
I think most application developers followed these UX recommendations closely, even games would often launch this way. (A game might have a settings menu accessed from its Icon Bar icon.)
> Drag-and-drop really seems to be the RISC OS idiomatic way to manipulate files.
Yes, that was how people worked. If you were working on an existing file you can just click "OK" to overwrite it with updates, or you can drag it somewhere else to do what we'd call "Save As" nowadays.
Possibly this was to support an OS that originally assumed floppy-disc-only use. Unlike Windows 3 (I think…) you could have Filer windows open for multiple floppy discs. You could drag a file to one of these, and the OS would prompt you to switch discs if it wasn't the one currently in the drive.
> Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file."
Anything you change in the !Configure application should be persisted in CMOS RAM, check your emulator if this is not happening.
Otherwise correct. Users with a hard disk would typically set up a !Boot file. On our family computer we each had one, but not loading on boot. They were in our personal folders, so opening that folder loaded our settings.
(Maybe floppy-only users did something similar, but we had a HDD from when I was about 7 years old so I don't remember.)
> Pipedream.
We had !Fireworkz installed on the family computer, but I think the most I would have done with it was make an army list for Warhammer.
It's nice to see what this software was capable of.
> The emulator itself expects some specific keyboard, with the \ | key situated between LEFT SHIFT and Z.
Keyboards with this key are using the ISO/IEC 9995 Europe physical keyboard layout (this extra key + a tall enter key). It's used by most European keyboards; having \| there is the British version.
You're spot on for the British phrases :-D
[1] https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Software%... / https://www.riscosopen.org/zipfiles/platform/common/StyleGui...
[-] I also found the RISC OS 3 Programmer's Reference Manual: https://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/
In contrast of what we used to have.