[Rant] AOS4 on AOne slow? Perhaps, perhaps not. | ANN.lu |
Posted on 23-Sep-2003 09:53 GMT by Fabio Alemagna | 105 comments View flat View list |
Ok, I haven't had a chance to look at those videos until a few minutes ago, and I thought I'd give some reasons for which it appears slow, basign my judgments on what I see and what I know about the AmigaOS internals.
First of all, I must say that, although there was perhaps nothing more to see, those videos only show one little part of the GUI system, which, from what we know, could perhaps be the only one a bit flawed.
In essence, what we are shown are 2 things: the speed with which Reaction GUIs are drawn (in Solid-Resize and GUI-Reactivity), and the way (a faulty one - but read on) opaque window moving is implemented (in Opaque-Move).
Indeed, Reaction GUIs are drawn quite slowly, but I can't help but notice that Reaction GUIs have always been inherently slow, at least on my UAE setup, much slower than any other GUI, even MUI. The reason for this can be researched in the fact that Reaction uses a completely different approach than MUI, which is also the reason for which I greatly dislike Reaction in favour of MUI. However, it's obvious that the redraw is quite slow also considering Reaction's faults, and this is possibly due to the fact that the gfx library was emulated, along with a basic chipset support (some blitter thingies, like the BLTDONE flag in DMACONR register), which surely slowed everything down a lot.
Using this argument to say that AOS4 is at the same stage MOS was 2 years ago is pure flamebait for mainly 2 reasons: 2 years ago MOS already had a native gfx subsystem (which renders the comparision useless, although it might seem that it makes the situation even worse for AOS4), and also because this gfx subsystem is a temporary one, and we don't know at which state of development the new one is (but I reckon it's close to completion, or on the way to it). In any case, such comparisions are meaningless because AOS4 has now things which MOS didn't have 2 years ago, and vice versa.
About the opaque moving, instead, it can be noticed that there's a flaw in its implementation, which basically makes it *very hard* to *impossible* for the damaged windows to refresh themselves until the movement has stopped. Read Georg Steger's explanation of this phenomenon here .
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AOS4 on AOne slow? Perhaps, perhaps not. : Comment 88 of 105 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Bernie Meyer on 24-Sep-2003 11:13 GMT | In reply to Comment 62 (BrianK): While you are of course right that app-specific interfaces increase learning time, I cannot really agree that that is a bad thing....For Grandma, it's a horrific idea, sure. As well as for me where, say, a do-your-income-tax program is concerned. That's because I do that maybe once a year, so I am perpetually at the bottom of the learning curve (just like most Grandmas tend to be, whose computer use is casual at best).However, in a normal day, I spend about 10-12 hours in front of a computer. That happens when you are employed as a software developer. If it takes me 10 hours to learn the interface of a new tool, which will then gives me a timesaving of 5% afterwards, I break even after about a month, and am way ahead after two months.An analogy --- when I build a shelf, I use a jigsaw, a screwdriver and a clawhammer. When a carpenter builds a shelf, he uses professianal rotary saws, a powerdrill and a nailgun. All of those tools are harder for the beginner to master (and, in fact, are physically dangerous) --- but they are the tools of the trade, and not investing the time to learn them would be stupid for somebody who uses that stuff every day.At some point, many (MANY!) years back, I spent a whole weekend adding some functionality for thread-based autokill to my newsreader. Ever since then, my newsreader has done *exactly* what I wanted, and I probably save a couple of minutes each time I read news. So once again, I am actually ahead....Moral of the story --- use the right tool for the job. And what the right tool is depends, among many other things, on how often you have to do the job. |
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