Please MS just go to hell...

[coppice]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

When you say edit, do you mean the forms filling functions you get with the Adobe tools, or actually altering the document/ The Adobe tools work for form filling, but most other Linux tools don't seem to have taken forms as seriously as they might have. For general document editing, what's wrong with LibreOffice, or Lyx, or a number of other document tools?

You can't "just" open any PDF in libre office and start editing.....

True. They come up with the tag "This document is open in read-only mode". You click "edit document" and off you go.

As the forum rules do not permit me to call you an idiot I will demonstrate!

Attached are two screen shots, one of a PDF readers view of the document and one of libre office draw, yea, because despite opening it in writer it decided to switch to draw. As you can hopefully see even before I give a toss about being able to edit, libre office could not even interpret the document properly. To the point that "rectifier" has become "rectier". i will happily pay someone money for a program specifically written to work on the PDF format, for the sub £200 that is better use of my time/money than titting about with a tool that was not really meant to do this job or at least they are still working on it! Lets not start talking about the inability in libre draw to do bookmarks and I don't have the time trying to find out if all of my lovely bookmarks will disappear the moment I hit save in libre office draw....

So, you opened a file full of graphics and were surprised it didn't open with a text editing tool? Very smart.

I guess you haven't editted PDFs that much. They are always a PITA, as they have lost all the metadata from the original file that made editing work smoothly. The quirks in your images look like the typical troubles you get with PDF editing. If you look at the several oddities in the PDF script itself you will probably find some hassles with fonts. If you only edit English files these things don't bite you every day. If you edit international PDFs you rarely see a file free of quirks. LibreOffice does no worse a job with PDFs than other things I have used. Even Adobe's own tools have all sorts of quirks, where they don't handle things like font substitution and TIFF embedding well. Adobe doesn't even seem to care. They made TIFF a long term important part of PDF, and stopped maintaining the TIFF spec. It seems they actually embrace a future full of quirks.

[coppice]

You can buy a modern NeXTstep machine from Argos these days 

You will have to explain that one.

[Ed.Kloonk]

You can buy a modern NeXTstep machine from Argos these days 

You will have to explain that one.

New old stock?

[bd139]

You can buy a modern NeXTstep machine from Argos these days 

You will have to explain that one.

Modern macOS (and iOS etc) is basically a direct descendent of NeXTstep on top of a hybrid Mach / BSD kernel. There are bits of NeXT hanging out still including the font selection dialog, services, the dock and the underlying architecture. And you can buy a mac on Argos.

Here's the evolution...

NeXTstep:



OSX developer preview 1



... several OSX releases later ...

macOS 11.4... this machine.



There's also Objective-C under it which originated on NeXTstep. They're replacing that now slowly with a more modern language (Swift) however but the whole signalling, dispatch and object model in the UI is the same.

[coppice]

You can buy a modern NeXTstep machine from Argos these days 

You will have to explain that one.

Modern macOS (and iOS etc) is basically a direct descendent of NeXTstep on top of a hybrid Mach / BSD kernel. There are bits of NeXT hanging out still including the font selection dialog, services, the dock and the underlying architecture. And you can buy a mac on Argos.

There's also Objective-C under it which originated on NeXTstep. They're replacing that now slowly with a more modern language (Swift) however but the whole signalling, dispatch and object model in the UI is the same.

I assume you never used a NeXTStep machine. Apple adopted the NeXTStep code base, but changed the feel of the UI to mimic the old MAC-OS, to keep the existing Apple user base happy. That UI has various benefits over the clunkiness of Windows. However, at least for the kind of work I do, the feel of NeXTStep let me work faster than anything I have access to today. Do you notice things like the scroll bars being on the left, instead of the right? That one thing made many of my activities much faster with NeXTStep.

[bd139]

You can buy a modern NeXTstep machine from Argos these days 

You will have to explain that one.

Modern macOS (and iOS etc) is basically a direct descendent of NeXTstep on top of a hybrid Mach / BSD kernel. There are bits of NeXT hanging out still including the font selection dialog, services, the dock and the underlying architecture. And you can buy a mac on Argos.

There's also Objective-C under it which originated on NeXTstep. They're replacing that now slowly with a more modern language (Swift) however but the whole signalling, dispatch and object model in the UI is the same.

I assume you never used a NeXTStep machine. Apple adopted the NeXTStep code base, but changed the feel of the UI to mimic the old MAC-OS, to keep the existing Apple user base happy. That UI has various benefits over the clunkiness of Windows. However, at least for the kind of work I do, the feel of NeXTStep let me work faster than anything I have access to today. Do you notice things like the scroll bars being on the left, instead of the right? That one thing made many of my activities much faster with NeXTStep.

I used one briefly. My tutor at university nearly bankrupted the department buying one and we got to play with it for a couple of hours. It was a world of difference to the SunOS 4 machines I was using at the time.

Scroll bars are 100% dead for me. If you look at the screenshot of my Mac above you will see there are none. Sure if you have a mouse plugged in you'll get them but I will always reach for the touch pad first. The touchpad gestures are considerably better than any other solution on any other platform and better than a mouse by far. I am 10x more productive on macOS as a whole due to this, the virtual desktop system and general integration. I can triple-swipe on the touchpad (switch desktops) between my mac desktop apps, a terminal emulator and a Windows RDP session.

I've got to be honest, putting them on the left with a mouse was a bad idea. There is more room to extend motion to the right of the keyboard than to the left. I regularly found myself banging the mouse on the keyboard using the Start menu on windows for example.

[rsjsouza]

.
Scroll bars are 100% dead for me. If you look at the screenshot of my Mac above you will see there are none. Sure if you have a mouse plugged in you'll get them but I will always reach for the touch pad first. The touchpad gestures are considerably better than any other solution on any other platform and better than a mouse by far. I am 10x more productive on macOS as a whole due to this, the virtual desktop system and general integration. I can triple-swipe on the touchpad (switch desktops) between my mac desktop apps, a terminal emulator and a Windows RDP session.

Each to its own... Despite I use the touchpad heavily with both regions or gestures (depending on the laptop,  including an Apple), I prefer the accuracy of real PgUp/PgDn keys or a decent scrollwheel mouse (preferrably with Back/Forward buttons as well). It took me quite some time to figure out why was that, and in my case it has to do with the distance and position of my fingers to the keyboard as a whole - a touchpad forces me to move from a comfortable position of the hands over the keyboard to a crumpled position of my arm where I need to reach to an area closer to my chest. Eons ago I used to use a touchpad on my desktop computer and it was much more comfortable as it was at the right of the keyboardand at rhe same distance.

.I've got to be honest, putting them on the left with a mouse was a bad idea. There is more room to extend motion to the right of the keyboard than to the left. I regularly found myself banging the mouse on the keyboard using the Start menu on windows for example.

I had a similar problem until I turned the mousepad 90° (to cover the newfangled 16:9 screens) and trained myself to get better control when setting the mouse sensitivity and acceleration properly.

[bd139]

My desk setup has a separate touchpad and keyboard. I’m using this laptop docked most of the time. The apple one is huge. I don’t like the touchpad being in front of the keyboard either. As for accuracy the touchpad is nothing like the PC ones - this gives pixel level accuracy on scroll with no lumpy scrolling and has back and forward gestures as well.

I used a top of the line dell touchpad recently and that was mostly hopeless in comparison.

[james_s]

I like a lot of things about my employer issued Macbook Pro but the keyboard is mediocre at best and the touchpad is way too big. It's absurdly huge, to big that it gets in the way and results in the keyboard being compromised  and there is no reason for it to be much larger than I can reach with my finger without having to move my whole hand. You can see in the right light the finger smudges where I touch it and I only use the lower-right corner, not even 1/4 of the total area, the rest is just wasted. Oh and the touchbar is a useless gimmick too. I love OLED displays so I really wanted to like it but ultimately the only thing it does is look neat, functionally there is absolutely nothing it does better than conventional keys and it drives me nuts that I have to give it an extra tap all the time to wake it up before I can adjust the volume, brightness or mute. I used to use it heavily for taking screenshots by touching a button but then one of the OS updates changed the default screenshot functionality so now the touchpad button for that is completely useless. Not sure if I can customize it, I tried briefly and then just started using the keyboard shortcut to activate the screenshot mode I use. Since it's activated by a feather touch I'm constantly brushing it by accident and it registers a touch. The really stupid thing is there's enough room even with that stupidly huge touchpad that they could have moved the touchbar up just far enough to include a row of function keys. At least the later model reverts to a real Esc key, I'm stuck with the idiotic touchbar key.

[bd139]

Not sure what gen MacBook you have but there was a really crappy period of MacBooks recently.

Touch Bar is apparently going on next generation MacBooks. It’s not popular. And new keyboards are much nicer (since end of 2020). Mine is an Air which has a proper keyboard.

[rsjsouza]

My desk setup has a separate touchpad and keyboard.

Ah, good. Not all is lost.   

[PKTKS]

Modern macOS (and iOS etc) is basically a direct descendent of NeXTstep on top of a hybrid Mach / BSD kernel. There are bits of NeXT hanging out still including the font selection dialog, services, the dock and the underlying architecture. And you can buy a mac on Argos.

Here's the evolution...

NeXTstep:

I like very much the look of NeXTstep.. 

Thankfully although Slackware base dropped OpenWindow/OpenLook from the code base.. they preserved the remarkable work of Alfredo Kojima and folks from WindowMaker.

Sometimes I like to fill the bench which these always awesome looks of NeXTstep...
It is still distributed and maintained in the master Slackware trunk...

included the awesome configuration tool virtually everything tunable.

Paul 

[madires]

NeXTstep's GUI doesn't look much different from AmigaOS's Workbench.

[bd139]

Indeed. It looks like software developers designed it on a Friday afternoon after the pub   

[PKTKS]

NeXTstep's GUI doesn't look much different from AmigaOS's Workbench.

Give me a break..

If you compare that with GEM you will mostly find it similar to first MS versions of their win 1 and 2x  as version 3x is mostly the OS/2 deteriorated..

But never similar to NeXTstep or the cool looking of NeXtaw widget set.

Paul

[bd139]

Fuck me amigaos is so ugly. Looks like someone with shit in their eyes used a mac for 5 minutes then proceeded to drink half a bottle of vodka and recall the experience.

[coppice]

NeXTstep's GUI doesn't look much different from AmigaOS's Workbench.

I see two problems there. One is they look completely different. The other is its not the look, but the details of the feel that make a UI more or less productive.

[madires]

Have you used Workbench 2.x or 3.x?

[Bassman59]

Not sure what gen MacBook you have but there was a really crappy period of MacBooks recently.

The 2017 MacBook Pro has the crappy keyboard. I know because I have that exact machine. And clearly Apple got the message from customers about it because in the very next refresh they were back to the older, better keyboard style, like on my wife's 2015 13" MacBook Pro (which is obviously a 6-year-old machine but still works like a champ, and is still supported with Big Sur!). Also they put a real fucking Escape key on the refresh instead of having it on the Touch Bar.

I don't know about the non-Pro MacBook models from that era because I have not played with one. When we bought our son a 2020 MacBook Air for school (literally like two weeks before the M1 machines were announced!) it had the better style of keyboard. The only Touch thing is the power button/TouchID thing. It has regular function and Escape keys.

Touch Bar is apparently going on next generation MacBooks. It’s not popular. And new keyboards are much nicer (since end of 2020). Mine is an Air which has a proper keyboard.

I think Apple got the message about the TouchBar, too. It's not that it's not popular. It's just that it's ... useless. Hell, even F1-F12 function keys are rarely used. Looking at how I use the machine, I think I know why. That big touchpad (which is totally great and every other manufacturer should just do exactly what Apple does with theirs) really makes it so easy to use the standard menus and toolbars. Look at the Mail program.TouchBar gives you a replica of the important things on the application's ToolBar. And that's cool if you are completely keyboard-centric. but I think most people (myself included) are very fast moving the mouse cursor with the TouchPad that we don't even think about using the TouchBar.

One application that makes good use of the TouchBar is Apple's Logic digital audio workstation. But I use Logic on the iMac way more often than I use it on the laptop, and there's no desktop keyboard with TouchBar, so I'm used to not using the TouchBar.

I thought that Apple might come out with a keyboard with the TouchBar, and that would go a long way to increasing TouchBar use. As it is, so many non-Apple applications don't bother supporting the TouchBar.

Put it into the category of "things that seem like a good/clever idea but don't actually add value."

[Bassman59]

I suppose that function keys are a vestige of the past, before GUIs. (Someone mentioned having to use Stop-A on a Sun, and I think the last time I thought about Stop-A on a Sun was ... 25 years ago? wow.)

Many many programs have a shit-ton of icons and button-bars and tool-bars, and they all have various keyboard shortcuts to the events triggered by pressings those buttons and icons.

And I bet that 'most users' don't bother with the keyboard shortcuts and function keys and instead click the mouse on the buttons and icons and menus. I know that, with rare exceptions, I don't. Why? Because every application has a different use for function keys and keyboard shortcuts. Just look at the mapping of keyboard shortcuts for any application. It's overwhelming. Logic has like a zillion. Kicad has north of a billion. Altium has several million. macOS has uncountable . Unless you live in one application day in day out for months at a time, you simply can't remember them all.

About the only keyboard shortcuts I use are the Enter key for "OK" in a dialog, Escape to close dialogs or get out of something, Alt-Tab to switch between application windows, and of course the standard CUI Cut, Copy, Paste (Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V). Let's add Undo and Redo to that list. Ctrl-Z is undo. But what is redo? Depends!

[bd139]

I wish for Stop-A every day. I used to drop out and use FORTH as a calculator occasionally.

Agree with you entirely on all points in both posts. A rarity as I'm quite a disagreeable character usually

[james_s]

Not sure what gen MacBook you have but there was a really crappy period of MacBooks recently.

Touch Bar is apparently going on next generation MacBooks. It’s not popular. And new keyboards are much nicer (since end of 2020). Mine is an Air which has a proper keyboard.

It's the 2017 model, it was brand new and state of the art when I was hired. A friend of mine has a slightly newer one and said the keyboard is decent on his and it also has a real Esc key but I haven't used it personally. I don't know anyone who really loves the touchbar, most either hate it or don't care one way or the other, but from what I saw it seemed like Apple was doubling down on it and not showing any signs of yielding but maybe they've finally realized it's a gimmick. I'm closer to the latter but having lived with it daily for a few years, given the choice I would opt to skip it. It doesn't offer much in the way of compelling uses and mine has had a flickering white square on one end for a couple of years now, it hasn't bothered me enough to make the trek to an Apple store and be without my laptop for however long that takes.

[james_s]

Fuck me amigaos is so ugly. Looks like someone with shit in their eyes used a mac for 5 minutes then proceeded to drink half a bottle of vodka and recall the experience.

Put it into the context of the era from which it came. When I first saw an Amiga back in the late 80s I was blown away. It could display stunning full color graphics in the era when Macs were still relying on a tiny built in monochrome display and most PCs had either Hercules monochrome or CGA with that godawful pink, light blue, yellow and white palate. The problem is that development pretty much ceased not long after that, Amiga OS is still essentially frozen in time more than 30 years ago.

[james_s]

That big touchpad (which is totally great and every other manufacturer should just do exactly what Apple does with theirs) really makes it so easy to use the standard menus and toolbars.

Uhg! Nooo! A lot of them already are and I hate it! If you like an absurdly huge touchpad that's fine, but please let's have options so we can choose! I want a much smaller touchpad, with real physical buttons under it. I typically rest my wrist while I'm using the touchpad and don't want to have to lift and move my entire arm just to use it. I've got the sensitivity cranked up all the way on all of my laptops and still none of them are sensitive enough, it requires way too much movement to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, I hate it. The touchpad on my old Toshiba from 2004 or whatever was fantastic, I still miss it. It was small and unobtrusive and it had real buttons with a nice tactile feel. I'd love it if I could get that on a modern laptop. I'm primarily a keyboard user though and I want it optimized for the keyboard, the touchpad just gets in the way most of the time.

[Raj]

That big touchpad (which is totally great and every other manufacturer should just do exactly what Apple does with theirs) really makes it so easy to use the standard menus and toolbars.

Uhg! Nooo! A lot of them already are and I hate it! If you like an absurdly huge touchpad that's fine, but please let's have options so we can choose! I want a much smaller touchpad, with real physical buttons under it. I typically rest my wrist while I'm using the touchpad and don't want to have to lift and move my entire arm just to use it. I've got the sensitivity cranked up all the way on all of my laptops and still none of them are sensitive enough, it requires way too much movement to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, I hate it. The touchpad on my old Toshiba from 2004 or whatever was fantastic, I still miss it. It was small and unobtrusive and it had real buttons with a nice tactile feel. I'd love it if I could get that on a modern laptop. I'm primarily a keyboard user though and I want it optimized for the keyboard, the touchpad just gets in the way most of the time.

So true. Also, I can operate a physical mouse & keyboard in total darkness (meaning I've learnt it, only sensation of touch is needed for feedback) but for touch interface, you have to keep looking at the thing to complete the "feedback loop".

Btw, my cousin had a razer deathstalker ultimate (a keyboard with lcd pad) I absolutely hated trying to input numbers using it or using it as a mouse or any other touch functionality. Also, having a dedicated touch interface hardware instead of using the one you already have is anti consumer. Someone should make an app that connects your PC and phone. The game-sim pilots are already doing that.