@milahoid
Can you explain what is so hard in going to the Ambient preferences -> Mime and configuring your own actions? Pure lazyness? There are help bubbles in edit mode even. MorphOS already has some preconfigured actions for various types, but there is no point of preconfiguring actions when used program doesn't exist in MorphOS ISO. Regarding MPlayer and other programs, including example actions would be nice for newcomers, but then you still have to set a path to the program. Sure, some things should be more user friendly, but is it really so hard? So, I will say it again, official manual covering basics would be very helpful (for fresh geeks who like to know something more about system at least, lazy people will not touch MorphOS anyway :P).

[ Edited by Korni on 2010/1/30 11:29 ]

> what is so hard in going to the Ambient preferences -> Mime
> and configuring your own actions? Pure lazyness?

It's not intuitive at all unless you are computer-savvy. Most normal people don't even know what MIME means. It's another small hurdle but when you combine them all together they amount a lot...

IMHO, an OS should not be there for it's own sake and get in the way but to transparently enable you to seamlessly use other programs. Maybe that's the fundamental difference with my approach.

Also, configuring MIME is OK, maybe even exciting the first time. But it gets boring after several times where you start telling your self that there must be a more streamlined way to associate the extension with the program (because most of the time you just want that).

In other words: Make the simple things easy and the advanced things possible.

So, after installing the filetypes application I now have "Open With..." and I like it because it saves me from that boring low-level work. Only if I want something more advanced I should be forced to go to the MIME settings. (Forgive me if "Open With..." was there before I installed the script, I forgot; if it was not there it should be there by default in MorphOS.) The filetypes app is great, its missing GUI but it would be easy to add it. Something as a front-end to the configuration file.

And, yes, laziness as well. Since my time with MorphOS is limited I would prefer to spend it doing more interesting things than configuring MIME types! It's 2010, come on...

> there is no point of preconfiguring actions when used program
> doesn't exist in MorphOS ISO.

Right. So maybe more viewers should be bundled with the OS and preconfigured. Today it's pretty much expected that OS can open dozens of well known file types. I understand MorphOS is not there yet and maybe that's not the direction of development.

Maybe having the Pack Ultimate run a post-installer script to do this optionally?

> you still have to set a path to the program.

Why? The installer must know where it is installing it.

> lazy people will not touch MorphOS anyway :P).

Well, that's fine. Some of them might be potential customers but I guess that's not important then?

there must be a more streamlined way to associate the extension with the program

Recognizing filetypes via extensions is a Windows lame way. I hope it will be never implemented in MorphOS. Amiga never relied on file extensions in the past and it should stay this way.

Quote:
Yes, your approch may be different in some aspects. And probably wiser and more promising (businesswise). But MorphOS is now good 10 years old with an even older heritage. The few users and the developers are just used to their way and niche. I think input like yours is important and constructive, but don't expect that everything gets accepeted or changed immediately. I guess the goal of MorphOS is not to become an OS X reloaded (read: the most intuitive and polished OS for Joe User), but rather to give the developers and users a good time. But making it a bit more appealing to more ppl is important and good, since the current user base is just too small to sustain.

> Recognizing filetypes via extensions is a Windows lame way.

Ok, maybe I used a wrong word. Does not have to be extension, but the concept of the association (btw what would be the MorphOS term?) should be easier to make.

> don't expect that everything gets accepeted or changed immediately.

Of course not! I am just hoping they get to some list and get prioritized appropriately. And if the prioritization is "never" that's perfectly fine. That's why I already asked whether it would be possible to see at least some of the existing bugs and feature request so that it is more clear what the short/mid term direction for MorphOS is. Without that, since its expensive and closed-source, most people would just assume one of main goals is to make money, therefore to expand the user-base, therefore to make it more appealing for a more regular users...

the concept of the association (btw what would be the MorphOS term?) should be easier to make.

In case of 3-rd party applications, associations should be done by install scripts of these applications. Adding such associations in the system distribution makes no sense. A simple example - Windows when installed does not associate PDF-s with Adobe Reader - it is done when you install the application.



[ Edited by Krashan on 2010/1/30 19:32 ]

Krashan, I agree with that.

However, you can still do lots of useful stuff in the modern Windows by default because it was made a part of the OS and nowadays people think that's how it is supposed to work. I understand if MorphOS paradigm is to keep those things outside the OS. It conceptually feels more like Windows 3.0 in this way (need viewers for everything) but it's more lean and customizable, of course and I understand that many of the existing users prefer to keep it that way and they like it because it is that way.

At least we have the Pack, the filetypes script, this site, and we can dig and customize ourself.

I was just thinking about making it more appealing right away for someone who might be not that proficient and someone who might get simply annoyed that the stuff they are used to "don't work" and at the same time scared and/or impatient to do it themselves. But maybe those people would never be a target group for MorphOS (unfortunately and sadly, most of the people who use computers these days are like that).

BTW, OS X handles PDF files automatically out of the box...

[ Edited by mihailod on 2010/1/30 12:22 ]

I think PDF files are also handled by the default configuration in MorphOS. :)

Actually, yes, they are, that's a good point

making it more appealing right away for someone who might be not that proficient and someone who might get simply annoyed that the stuff they are used to "don't work" and at the same time scared and/or impatient to do it themselves

Adding associations for programs not present on the default system installation will not contribute to positive user experience, that's for sure. There is no difference for the user why doubleclick does not work. It just doesn't. And, people which are annoyed by something and impatient to fix it (with some simple actions) should not use desktop computers in the first place. Your concept that "MorphOS should be for everyone" is wrong at the basis IMHO.

> MorphOS [... ] runs on iMac

Don't think so ;-)

> people which are annoyed by something and impatient to fix it
> (with some simple actions) should not use desktop computers in the first place.

But they do... And "some simple actions" is a very loaded term. Something simple for someone is incredible difficult and non-intuitive to someone else and vice versa.

This is an example of another elitist statement which can only hurt ANY product because it becomes embedded in the design philosophy and usability decisions and seriously limits potential to promote and sell to more people. But if that is not the goal, I understand.

IMHO computers and computer programs should not be in the way of doing the real task for which they are used for and designed for. They are TOOLS. Computer is a tool. Any program is a tool. An operating system is a tool. MorphOS is a tool. If it is hard to use, then it's not a good tool.

> Your concept that "MorphOS should be for everyone" is wrong at the basis IMHO.

If that's MorphOS team official position, that's sad then... AFAIR, Amiga was designed and it strived to be for everyone and that was something the original designers were really proud of...

> MorphOS [... ] runs on iMac
>>Don't think so

Yeah, typo... Mac Mini of course.

Installers suck. Apps shouldn't need an installer.

About MIMEtypes... I think that a script for lazy people to asociate MPlayer with video files may be more than enough. I don't want an installer for MPlayer simply because MPlayer is great as it is now. I don't want to execute damn installers each time I perform changes in my HD structure or each time I move apps between my computers.

@mihailod,

Your arguments are strangely familiar to me and similar to those that I first posted to these forums after I made the decision to support MorphOS and buy an Efika almost 1-1/2 years ago when I lost faith in the direction and lack of progress the Hyperion and AmigaOS4.x groups were making at that time (they have made progress since then).

I had decided that I had waited and was tired of sitting on the fence, not making a commitment one way or the other and wanted to support at least one of the Next Gen Amiga systems, so I took the plunge and went with MorphOS (and have not regretted my decision).

I too voiced my opinion that MorphOS seemed to be better suited to an elitist group and not for "newbies" such as I was (and in some ways still am), but I was chastised for such opinions by many people here. They did not appreciate being labeled "Elitist", so I refrained from any further discussions on that topic. Later I do think there was some justification from some developers and members here that MorphOS is NOT intended, or ready for the average computer user of today that is only used to Windows or MacOSX.

It was finally explained to me and I learned much by myself that the resources currently available to work on developing MorphOS do not allow time and effort to be expended on much refinement of MorphOS to make it as easy to learn and use as Windows or MacOSX, nor is there a great desire to market it to those users who are not familiar with, or indeed who are not former users of AmigaOS. Maybe that will change some day in the future now that MorphOS is a commercial product, but it will likely not happen very quickly. I have noticed an improvement over the last year though, which is encouraging for someone like me who wishes to see the MorphOS user base grow as quickly as possible.

Another thing to consider is that MorphOS has been in development for quite a long time and I would guess that most, if not all of the members of the development team working on it have been with the team for several years and they are now so familiar with all the workings of MorphOS that is is second nature to them and they take for granted those things which you and I struggle to accomplish. In that way, the thousands of MorphOS users that have learned to use it from the beginning and have been using it for many years ARE an Elite group of people with a special skill set that you and I must learn. Until the big jump was made from the free versions of 1.x, to the paid version 2.0 and beyond, there was a long period of time where little new was happening in the development of MorphOS and I would guess that there were also few new users during that time, so new MorphOS users are also something that is somewhat rare and new to deal with over this past year and a half. This can sometimes be interpreted by the "newbies" like you and I as the long time users being an elite group that are not actively trying to promote MorphOS to new users, but I think I understand the long time users and the Development Team pretty well now and I agree with their reasoning.

It is a "Catch 22" as we would put it in the USA. To get more developers interested in writing code for MorphOS, we need a larger user base that will buy the OS and programs written for it, but to get a larger user base, we need more developers working on the OS itself to refine it and complete missing pieces (such as drivers for different video cards, or wifi, etc.) and to write third party apps and games that we all need and want. What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

I have nothing but praise for the MorphOS development team and what they have accomplished with the small amount of resources they have available to them. I hope that their resources increase with time, but with the small size of our user base, it is difficult to expect much change as there will likely never be any decent profit to be made from writing code for MorphOS and even the most ardent supporters may get tired of donating their free time, or working for next to nothing at some time or other. I just hope that it does not die completely and can somehow continue for many years to come, as it is a very nice little OS and I like the way it works and looks.

So, I hope you can understand that the position of the MorphOS development team is not that they do not wish to appeal to a wider audience, but that they only have a very limited amount of people and hours to work on MorphOS, and as at least one of the developers has said, the fine tuning of the user interface to make it as easy to use as Windows, or MacOSX would most likely be left until the end of their work, if it is done at all, as there are so many other parts of the OS that the team believes are more important to complete first. That is why some (probably all or most) of the team members have written that they do not think it is a wise choice to promote MorphOS to non-Amiga users until it is further developed. It is not ready for "Prime Time" yet, even though it is greatly improved and very usable for those who know how and who have experience with Amigas and/or perhaps Linux and don't mind configuring things manually.

Still, I hope to work on writing installer scripts for many MorphOS programs that do not already have one for inexperienced users and newbies, or lazy users that do not like to manually configure settings themselves.

>> our concept that "MorphOS should be for everyone" is wrong at the basis IMHO.

> If that's MorphOS team official position, that's sad then...

I guess "in my honest opinion" does not qualify the statement as official MorphOS Team position .

Womderful discussion, I love it. And feel unable to add anything new to it. Then, I realized that this "intermediate state" of MorphOS, always hoping to become something bigger, is NO PROBLEM for me!

Why always hoping to become a regular operating system? There are a couple of them out there which are not only very "good", nut also are accepted by the public as "good", no matter what else you put against them. Even if they were "bad", just the fact that everyone uses them makes them good.

Attempting to become like them is impossible given the current resources. Please don't forget: If you see that MorphOS lacks something, it can be something else but "elitism". It can be as simple as there's nobody with enough free time and motivation to cover that need. Open source then? Well, Ambient is open source, and still lacks little things.

But back on topic, I just love MorphOS as it is now. For me it's a pity that people regret it because it lacks some functions, and should always be pointing relentlessly at becoming a stardard commercial product. When a computer, effectively, becomes invisible to the user. That's boring! That's non-educating! And worst of all, that doesn't make sense: No matter how hard the MorphOS team works, it's impossible to add as much functions as those products have. The goal being mecoming invisible, just like the rest?

Learning about computers is a wonderful experience. I still can feel it today, after almost thirty years playing and working with these machines. Wow, it's been that long?

Yes, and for me, even if MorphOS ends tomorrow, it's been worth it, a hell of a ride. When humans had a relation with its computers, teaching them, actually growing them up.

Of course, today, you can buy a computer that does "everything" out of the box. There's nothing the MorphOS Team can do to stop you doing so. But where's the fun in there?

MAKE YOU OWN EXPERIENCE. NOT BUY IT.

And no, this is not evangelism. Its pure logic.

@korni

Quote:

It could be done better. Ambient could detect the filetype and if there is no application associated with it Ambient could let user to locate application and ask if user would like to make it default.

But I don tknow who would implement it :P

That's right. Ambient mimetypes window with a "No hexview yet for..." text and an Ok button could be extended to something more useable :D.

Quote:

Right! For example, jumping to "http://ambient.sourceforge.org/filetypes/explained.php?doc", where you could read all about it, and perhaps, download the appropiate tool, and maybe even the indiviidual MIME type definition.

@itix

If the filetype itself isn't known, that's a different situation, but for filetypes having no defined actions, it's rather easy to bring some simplified window asking which program should be used, and build the mimetype action automatically. It's actually on my todo list since quite some time. But of course, this approach can't be bullet proof, since there are always programs with special invocation arguments, or whatever.

> I don't want to execute damn installers each time I perform
> changes in my HD structure or each time I move apps between my computers.

No, no... If you change the HD structure, that should be TRANSPARENT. Double clicking should still JUST WORK. OS should be "intelligent" and find the viewer on the new place.

Remember the MD5 of the viewer, intercept the failed operation, do a quick file find by MD5 on all filesystems while displaying "Attempting to relocate the viewer...". If you find it, change the internal pointer to it and open the file. Done. If you don't find it (the viewer was deleted or corrupted) display a window "Could not locate the viewer, please locate it manually".

Now, if a viewer has an installer, the situation where you update from one version to another (and, therefore, change its MD5) would be also handled automatically.

amigadave, I agree with everything you wrote. I only have couple of remarks:

> from some developers and members here that MorphOS is NOT intended,
> or ready for the average computer user of today

NOT READY I can understand.
NOT INTENDED I can't.

> users being an elite group that are not actively trying
> to promote MorphOS to new users

I only marked some statements on this forum as elitist since those statements might discourage potential customers.

> It is a "Catch 22" as we would put it in the USA.

Yep, I mentioned exactly this several times.

> they do not think it is a wise choice to promote MorphOS to non-Amiga users
> until it is further developed. It is not ready for "Prime Time" yet, even though
> it is greatly improved and very usable for those who know how and who have
> experience with Amigas and/or perhaps Linux and don't mind configuring things manually.

This is probably the best positioning of MorphOS I have read so far and I hope the "Prime Time" means that an average user can use it transparently for the basic work of today (web browsing, listening music, watching movies, emailing, printing, wifi). Because that is the situation from which you can grow to many directions (including the tinkering and hacking one).

The only thing I am actually complaining is the lack of transparency wrt existing bugs and feature requests. You have to dig the forum and the mailing list (there is actually one really interesting thread about new Ambient features going on there) and even talk to people directly over email. Redundancy and inefficiency is inevitable in that situation. Having a centralized place where all bugs and feature requests are openly stored, prioritized, discussed and VOTED on by users (registered users votes get more points for example so that we can see where the money lies) and commented by developers would be really beneficial. Again, something like Sun did for Java bugs: http://bugs.sun.com -- really nice.

@jcmarcos:

> this "intermediate state" of MorphOS, always hoping to become
> something bigger, is NO PROBLEM for me!

All these hungry people in the world are NO PROBLEM for me because I have enough food for myself

Seriously, it can become a problem even for you if the project dies, right?

> it can be something else but "elitism".

Yeah, maybe I was not clear with this "elitism" thing, I explained it above.

> When a computer, effectively, becomes invisible to the user.
> That's boring! That's non-educating!

I have never seen boring computers. Each computer is a turing-complete machine and, therefore, anything is possible. I have only seen people who don't want to experiment and who can make any machine "boring". I had known people people owning "fun" Amigas who did not do anything interesting. And I had known people who had times of their lives hacking "boring" proprietary mainframe machines. The thing is that, once you remove the initial hurdles, you put the computer in the hands of even more people and you discover even more hackers and tweakers. The other "boring" users are just there to pay money to support the whole thing. BUT IT HAS TO "JUST WORK" FOR THEM. Right now MorphOS is used only by a small group of dedicated people and the survival of it hinges on the good will of developers who are doing a gargantuan task in their free time and with limited resources. Imagine 10x bigger MorphOS user base where 90% are boring but paying 150 euros and 10% are still here on this forum, having fun and tweaking. Now *that* is a sweet spot, eh?

> Learning about computers is a wonderful experience.
> I still can feel it today, after almost thirty years playing
> and working with these machines. Wow, it's been that long?

I agree. But nothing I proposed here would prevent anyone from doing that. It's been around 26 years for me btw

> When humans had a relation with its computers,
> teaching them, actually growing them up.

Agreed.

> Of course, today, you can buy a computer that does "everything" out of the box.
> There's nothing the MorphOS Team can do to stop you doing so.
> But where's the fun in there?

The fun is having other people using it in a limited way and paying for developers so that project does not die and still letting you explore it in any way you want!

> MAKE YOU OWN EXPERIENCE. NOT BUY IT.

Buy a decent experience good enough for 90% of the people who will make the whole thing sustainable, then customize yourself as you like. Nothing I said is in contrast with that!

For some reason you perceive that going mainstream would be bad. Look at UNIX. A huge mainstream serious system, yet a source of endless pranks, hacks and an immensely deep toy for playing and understanding very fundamentals of computer science...

@Krashan

> In case of 3-rd party applications, associations should be done by install scripts of these applications.

Please can you give a small example script showing how to modify Ambient MIME settings.

> I guess "in my honest opinion" does not qualify the statement as official MorphOS Team position

It is quite clear that this is your personal opinion. By the way IMHO = In My *Humble* Opinion.

IMHO, MorphOS has too many of these rough edges. I think most people would prefer a fully configured system when they buy it; or at least the option to install full configuration. I don't like buying a new version and then spending hours to make it usable.