It’s not a matter of new GUI’s not building the tools. It’s the difference
between the Unix world and the consumer desktop world. Unix has long been the
realm of the highly technical. Forget whether its usable by your average joe
consumer. The question is, does it do cool things in the eye’s of a computer
geek. These guys are responsible for major innovations in computer power, and
technical tools. Not user friendly GUI tools. They are one end of the
spectrum.
The other end has been the Macintosh, and to a smaller extent (IMHO), Windows
(The consumer versions, not NT and 2000). The intent here, is screw the
technical aspects. Lets make the this thing as easy as possible for joe
consumer, and sally notech, to use. Give them art/design programs, give them
office tools, give them checkbook programs. They don’t want to be wowed by the
computer technology, they want to be wowed by what the computer can do for them
in their often non technical endeavors.
Now the two extremes are starting to attempt to meet in the middle. The highly
technical Unix’s (like QNX and Linux and Solaris) are attempting to adopt a
friendly GUI (maybe not all the way towards checkbook programs, but at least
some tools that make things easier), and the consumer OS’s are trying to become
more technical, like MacOS X, rebasing itself on variants of Unix. Because
this trend is in its infancy, there’s boud to be trouble, as people come in
expecting things to be marvelous, and things are only half marvelous.
So I guess, what I am saying, is, if you thought this new QRTP was going to be
a romp in the park new replacment for your windows or Mac OS desktop, think
again. Lower your expectations. This QRTP is being targeted as a nice to use
development platform for embedded software engineers, who happen to also like
playing with cool toys like GUI MP3 players, and who want to develop in a
desktop environment with RAD tools, rather than a command line terminal hooked
up to an embedded system. At least that’s what I have gathered. If it takes
off, and people develop for it as a consumer desktop, and open a new market for
it, perhaps QSSL will love that. Then again perhaps not. It might be too much
expansion, to fast for them.
If you want desktop, visit windows Me (ha!), or better yet, check out the beta
of MacOS X ($29.95US at http://store.apple.com/), if you want to see the future
of the ultimate in user friendly, combined with the Unix command line. You
will run into some of the same problem there that you are running into here
(it is a beta after all, just like QRTP, and it is Unix), but you can keep away
from that if you want. For instance, the Omni Group’s web browser (OmniWeb
http://www.omnigroup.com/) can be installed with a tar.gz, as you are
complaining about here, but it can also be downloaded and installed with a
Stuffit Expander compressed package, with just two double clicks, and a great
GUI installer.
Be thankful, if you like this kind of stuff, that QSSL has allowed you to see
there OS in such an early state of development. Go with the flow. It’ll get
better. In the meantime, if you need a fairly solid realtime OS, buy QNX4.25.
Scott
“Daryl O.” wrote:
Why does a GUI extractor for compressed files is always the last thing
to be invented in new Gui OS’s, is it a pain to program such a thing or
programmers just dont have any use for such things ? >> (Kosh)
It’s a shame, isn’t it? I spent hours last night trying to figure out how
to install a few programmes that I had downloaded, and I couldn’t
successfully install even one of them. First, I discovered that one CANNOT
have the source file in a non-QNX (i.e. fs) folder, as QNX does not
recognise such directories in terminal mode. I therefore moved those QNX
download files to a new downloads folder that I created in /usr/. I then
managed to successfully decompress an abiword file, but that decompression
resulted in a file that was itself evidently compressed (qpk), and I had no
idea what to do with it. I later moved one of those downloaded files to
root/repository, thinking that maybe that would be the correct folder to
decompress from. From it, I apparently successfully decompressed
aim.nto.gz, but I couldn’t locate where its decompressed contents had been
placed. I found an install.msg file under the /root/ directory, but I
couldn’t find any of the files that it referred to. They supposedly begin
with the pathname .photon. I think I looked in every photon folder in QNX,
and I found no AIM files. Unfortunately, QNX’s file manager doesn’t have a
find function, which is absolutely stupid.
I’m getting too frustrated with QNX. It’s bad enough that I don’t have
sound and I can’t install any programmes; I can’t even download any files
into QNX’s package manager because QNX keeps on dropping my connections
(when I actually manage to connect). On top of that, my ‘shelves’ are
temperamental, so I’m always having to press the Windows key to bring them
up, or re-size the window on top. I think QNX has a lot of promise, but
this little OS is a bit too buggy. It shouldn’t have been released like
this…
Daryl
–
To Reply to Sender, Replace * in Address, with an ‘a’.
DARYL O. > darylo@usa.net