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The RISC OS GUI

(telcontar.net)
75 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fidotron ◴[] No.44023455[source]
> When a program needs to allow the user to choose a file, drag and drop is again used, with the window providing a drop area to collect the file

The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another, without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at all.

I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust". Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.

Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.

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Lammy ◴[] No.44024070[source]
> rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop

ROX-Filer is still to this day my file manager of choice for any X11 system.

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1. fiddlerwoaroof ◴[] No.44024121[source]
Yeah, ROX-Filer is an amazingly good bit of software, once you figure out its UX quirks