| [News] Olaf Barthel Interview | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 10-Jun-2002 09:11 GMT by Rodney McDonell | 56 comments
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Finaly i have finished my interview with Olaf Barthel. At near 6000 words, its not a bad read, and probably one of my best interviews yet. Get to know a great man, read it now!
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| Olaf Barthel Interview : Comment 30 of 56 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 11-Jun-2002 02:09 GMT | I'm not going to rag on the jokes, I'm just going to say they work better when the interviewee is in on them. :)
Olaf is deeper in the innards of the system than likely anyone posting in this thread. He obviously has good knowledge of exactly what it lacks. Still, I'm a bit nervous about the second-system syndrome brewing; much of the OS is outdated, but on the same token, it's the only thing left that everyone can agree is "Amigan." Further, we already have a second-system in the works- the DE.
Where Olaf is seeing cruft, I'm still seeing possibilities- it helps that I'm just some UI nut, who's barely used the OS. If Workbench can't handle regular gadgets, why not take advantage of the simple consistency the menu system lends, and work up a system that leverages that to provide different UIs? (This is, in fact, what seems to be happening, with the popup menus and presumably other extensibility.) If reading many tiny .info files to get at icons is a pain, why not have the filesystem reserve space for them and optimize their position in some way? Streaming media- others have made some great arguments for leveraging Datatypes, even as I'm pretty clueless, never having gotten off OS2.1.
I'm sure he recognizes the same things (heck, for all I know, he was one of those whapping me for failing to realize Datatypes existed!), but actually dealing with the poor mangled code must be a fair headache, and there are always those times that scrapping it and starting over seems like it couldn't possibly be any worse.
I know *I'd* like to see a Workbench replacement (though done with a set of UI problems in mind, not just for the sake of replacing Workbench), but for it to become default, there has to be some sort of connection with the past. Since there's only time for evolutionary development anyway, it's time to stop asking, "What can we replace ___ with?" and start asking, "How can we make ____ better?" That's what the developers, Olaf included, have been trying to keep in mind all along (even as the urge to drag it to the trash and replace it with a whiz-bang buzzword-compliant does-it-all-and-irons-your-pants-too Second System(TM) wells), and it's time to give them credit for it. |
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