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Posted on 08/15/2006 9:31:36 PM PDT by BillF
If you ever get access to a Mac running 10.4, install the (included) developer tools, and look at Quartz Composer. It's a construction kit that lets you hook in non-programatically to Mac OS X's Quartz graphic system. The movies are playable with QuickTime (at least on the Mac, I'm not sure about Windows).
Quartz Composer is like Flash on steroids, as it is largely hardware accelerated. Actually, the Flash guys re-wrote Flash on the Mac to ride on top of this system, so now Flash flies on the Mac.
None of this makes any sense to talk about without pointing you to examples. If you go to Futurisimo Zugakousaku's Quartz Composer Samples page you'll see some amazing work, all with a clean Japanese aesthetic. The great thing about this is you can download one of his works, then open it up and edit it to your heart's content.
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Huh? That's a little like saying at least Willie Sutton didn't rob FDIC insured banks (if, in fact, he didn't).
Steve Jobs visited Xerox and was given demonstrations of a primitive GUI. Apple's employees proceeded to build their own version from scratch, and actually invented many items that are now taken for granted. Xerox did not invent many of the GUI look and feel items that were present in the LISA and first Mac.
Bill Gates requested a demonstation of Apple's GUI in the early 1980's. Steve Jobs not only allowed Bill Gates to have full access to the Macintosh development team, but he also gave copies of the actual code for the GUI! He overruled protests by his own people, upset that their own boss was letting corporate secrets walk out the door. Bill Gates then had his Microsoft team utilized this code to build Windows, copying many feature items from the Mac (trashcan, titlebar commands, etc.).
The facts are that Windows is indeed ripped off of Apple's Mac.
Yes, my vote also goes for emacs as the greatest program of all time.
One of the earliest Apple-II programs I wrote (late 1977) was done on a 2KB Apple-II. Only 512 bytes was usable by the user, the other 1.5 kilobytes was reserved by the sytem. It was a complete KENO gambling game, with color graphics. Local Computerland stores (San Francisco peninsula) used it to demonstrate store-window Apple-II's. There's a lot you can do with 6502 assembler language, using small amounts of memory. Back then, 16KB memory was going for $500. That's 16 kilobytes, not mega or giga.
Well, I'm sure that what I'm about to add will not be seen as greatness in light of what we have now, but, in the mid 60's an IBM team developed an operating system for the 1130 minicomputer that had an 8K byte RAM. Included in this operating system was a FORTRAN compiler, which was in a few years joined by RPG, COBOL, and BASIC. The disk for all of this was 640KB.
Never did play Adventure. I do vaguely recall writing machine language programs on a PDP-8 to control LED character segments. Sigh, should have played more games!
It's amazing, how much of 1970's CP/M and old programs are still around and in use, within modern-day programs. To this day I also use CTRL- keyboard commands. A lot of people are lost if their mouse dies - not us oldtimers.
Wow... Adventure on the PDP... I recall running it. It required TWO floppies to load (8") and took at least 5 minutes before you could even start to play.
I thought control-X was cursor down. I never actually used Wordstar, but on all the applications that use "Worstar" keys, there's a diamond formed by control-ESDX for the basic cursor operations; A and F move a word at a time (think of those as extensions of the diamond). R and C are page-up and page-down; W and Z scroll the screen a line at a time while keeping the cursor at the same place in the text (if possible). Control T was delete word and control-Y was yank line.
For "big" moves, use control-Q followed by ESDXRC. For block operations, use control-K followed by B for begin block, K for end block, H to hide/unhide, C for copy, V for move, Y for delete, W for write, or R for read. Also, control-QB moves to the start of a block or control-QK to the end.
Borland's editor also has a handy feature I've not seen elsewhere: control-K 1-9 will set a bookmark, and control-Q 1-9 will go there.
Keyboards are nice things, aren't they?
You're correct. Ctrl-X is part of the keyboard movement diamond.
PHOTOSHOP!
sincerely,
Adnan Hajj
;-)
You must be a person of high intellect and good taste. :-)
Do you work around people like I do, crippled by addiction to vi? Even funnier, our outsourcing partner in Bangalore has programmers who use notepad!
If there's a better editor than emacs for programming, I'd like to hear about it.
>>Windows is indeed ripped off of Apple's Mac.<<
Xerox sued Apple for the same reason Apple sued MS. Furhter, there were former Xerox PARC members on the Apple team that developed the Mac gui.
There's no difference between what Apple allegedly did to Xerox and what MS alledgedly did to Apple. Pretending otherwise is absurd.
Gnuplot.
It's free.
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