[Oberon] Re. Blackbox open source available

[John Drake]

--- shark at gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca wrote:

> Chris,
> 
> cg> Glancing through BlueBottle notes it seems that
> it aims to ape M$.
> 
> My first guess would be that they are trying to 
> give BB a fighting chance against the popular
> systems.  Why not?

As Doug pointed out it's important to keep our
"BBs" straight. ;) It's ironic that the name
was changed from AOS to BlueBottle to avoid an
ancronym clash with another operating system
only to cause a clash with another member of
the Oberon family. :D

Anyway I think the paths taken by BlueBottle
and BlackBox are similair, but importantly
different.  BlueBottle doesn't simply "ape"
M$, it leapfrogs it with the ability to be 
easily "skinned", as well as transparency
support.  BlackBox was indeed designed to
"ape" whatever system it ran on (Windows
and Mac originally) and to adopt the "look
and feel" of the host OS.  (This was before
Java SWING.)  This wasn't so much to convince
Oberon users to "convert" as it was to give
Oberon developers a way to make "sellable" 
products.  Occassionally you can convince
an end user who's never scene a particular
user interface to try something radically
different (the 3D package "Blender" comes
to mind) but that's the exception rather
than the rule.

One place were the Oberon community has
(sadly) missed the boat is in the area of
common libraries.  Even where the different
Oberon systems COULD be the same (like the
various "Texts" subsystems) they are
different.  It would be nice to be able to
develop under Sys 3 or V4 and only have to
worry about porting to GUI when going to
BlackBox.  Oh well.
 
> cg> I just can't understand it !!  
> 
> Certainly many users preferred tiled viewers to 
> arbitrary viewers.  This to the extent of using 
> Gadgets within the tiled interface rather than 
> Gadgets alone.
> 
> More than one interface can be available in an 
> OS.  Currently there is an Oberon within BB and 
> we can hope that, after all the Oberon 
> capabilities are implemented in BB, the best of 
> the Oberon interface remains as an option. 
> 
> Regards,       Peter E.
> 
> Desktops.OpenDoc  http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/

Personal rant here.  While I'm still a fan of
original Oberon "tiled viewers" I'm beginning to
be weary (wary?) of the corded mouse setup.  
Here's the reason.  Recently I've been doing a 
lot of work with V4 due to it's ODBC support.
On occassion when I've done the "delete" 
interclick, the mouse has shifted slightly 
marking (and deleting) more text than I wanted.
I'm an experienced Oberon user, so I can only
imagine how frustraiting this could be for a
novice.  The S3 versions I use most (Windows
plugin and WinAOS) allow me to do "Ctrl-X" 
or "Del" instead.  That's now my personal 
preference.

Regards,

John M. Drake


		
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