Ok, after my slight anger on IRC, i've decided to write a constructive
email and post it here. Please note this is my opinion, though others
may agree with me.
First of all, Martin, let me say i have the utmost respect for you and
your work.
However, it has come to my attention that the explorer clone is starting
to become a mess. It has too many 'features' built in. The compaints i
have are:
1) Too many 'ways' to browse a users computer. You have all those
buttons at the toolbar, why not just make those features into shell
extensions or at the very LEAST compiletime options. Explorer needs
only 1 way to browse directories/files. (Which should be whichever way
that closely resembles microsoft's windows, and by all means winefile
and explorer should be seperate applications.) Among the features that
need to go are: The web support, Registry browser, NT Object File
System or whatever the hell it's called, The 'shell browser' or whatever
it is, The little bar above the Status bar should go. The Interface
shouldn't be MDI, as microsoft's is not.
2) The toolbar has nothing useful. The windows explorer toolbar has
back, forward, and up buttons for example, to browse the users
computer. Our explorer has none of these.
3) The web support needs to go. I don't know what all was done, but
web support causes alot of potential vulnerabilities. Just look at
microsoft's windows, and even IF it didn't, loading IE/mozilla every
time explorer starts is a WASTE.
Normally i'd stand back, work on my own explorer clone, but this IS
ReactOS, our goal is to clone windows, we need to keep our UI as
consistent as possible with microsoft's. If you sit down a user in
front of our current explorer, he/she would be most definitely lost.
While i would say hide the features, they'd still be there, increasing
application size, code complexity, memory requirements, dependencies,
and slowing the app down, and this isn't an ideal solution.
Solution: I really think we should clone the Windows NT 4.0 explorer,
with quicklaunch, but nothing more. Make everything else addins or
compiletime options. The interface really should be more similar to the
windows version of explorer, with nothing new to confuse users, etc.
This will make explorer less buggy and faster, it will also consume less
RAM. Currently explorer is even slower then microsoft's own explorer.
Granted it is an alpha version, but still, these 'new features' are
still getting injected every once and a while, making things even worse,
when time/energy would be better spent working on shell32 or fixing
bugs/optimizing explorer and code cleanup.
Don't get me wrong, i think explorer is great, it's a marvelous piece of
work. And my opinion is one of many, but keep in mind i'm not speaking
for the supergeeks here, i'm speaking for the power users and regular
users, the customer support reps and myself.
Take care, and please don't flame me, martin, or anyone else.
Richard.
What about internally rendering it at double the pixel dimension, then
applying bicubic resampling before screen render?
How about an OpenGL solution for hardware antialiasing support?
Just a couple of ideas.
Martin Fuchs wrote:
>I prefer MDI like in WINFILE, as it reduces the number of windows
you
>
>have to manage on your desktop. It packages them into one common
>
>frame window, so you don't need an extra app window for any open
folder
>
>
I think that tabs, as in Mozilla, is a better solution.
Cheers
Jason
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The one thing a lot of people I know who use Windows 2000 have talked about
that tempted them to switch to Windows XP despite the bloat is ClearType
subpixel rendering technology, an alternate to simple font smoothing
introduced in Windows 95.
If ReactOS can offer superior subpixel rendering of fonts (ala Photoshop or
better) I could see it seriously competing.
At 12:00 PM 2/15/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Martin Fuchs wrote:
>
> > last week ;-) But that's the only point.
> > To attract more users we have to present them more features/functionality/
> > usability than Microsoft.
>
>Actually, I have to speak up and disagree with this. One of the main
>reasons I would love to move to ReactOS is to get rid of all that stuff.
We need to appeal to a wide audience, who all have different preferences on how
to do common tasks. I think we need to at least attempt to accomodate them
all.
> > Let's use preprocessor directives (e.g. #ifndef _LEAN_EXPLORER) to disable
> > extended functionality in explorer. This way we can maintain one codebase
> > to create
>
>Ick. In my experience preprocessor directives result in code that falls
>apart.
It's funny, I used to think MS tried too hard to put every feature under
the sun in
their OS, but after reading discussions like this, I realize the conundrum
they were
in.
I suggest we build several explorers, the explorer shell should have the
SDI approach
with an optional directroy tree pane, a winfile style shell with an MDI
interface, and
a filezilla shell with a tab interface. Then we let the users decide which
shell they like.
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Rex Jolliff
rex(a)lvcm.com
ReactOS (www.reactos.com) -- Check it out
Hi, this is my first post to list.
I run ReactOS 0.2 final, in VMWare 4.0.2 build-5592
Installation was successful and booted the ReactOS. while trying with
menus, when i come on Settings~Printers menu,
i get an error:
ShellClasses COM Exception
E_ACCESS_DENIED - win32 access denied error
Context: ShellFolder::ShellFolder(IShellFolder*,LPCITEMIDLIST)
Location: utility/shellclasses.cpp:275
i use a dell latitude d600 laptop, current vmware host is Windows XP
If anybody can give me more information about providing debug information,
i will post it.
Hüseyin
Hi!
Got this~
make -f Makefile -C ../reactos/../posix/server
make[1]: Entering directory `/scsi/ros/posix/server'
i386-mingw32-gcc -Iinclude -I../include -D__PSXSS_ON_W32__ -I./ -I../../reactos/include -pipe
-march=i386 -D_M_IX86 -c misc/main.c -o misc/main.o
In file included from include/psxss.h:8,
from misc/main.c:35:
../include/psx/lpcproto.h:89:25: psx/syscall.h: No such file or directory
make[1]: *** [misc/main.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/scsi/ros/posix/server'
make: *** [server] Error 2
I can not find syscall.h. Does anyone know where it went?
I'm playing with posix right now since it's on my mind,
Thanks,
James