Re: HTML-Browser for the GS??????

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <448eri$gg8@news.informix.com>,
Florian Delonge  <floriand@informix.com> wrote:
>Let me just explain the idea behind this: Our user group wants to
>distribute a News Letter On Disk with some sort of front-end programm
>different from the ol� Hyper*** stuff.

   Hell. I'd love to release every program I write with a GS/OS based
demo that knocked everyone's socks off, and beat the FTA in all sorts
of ways. Problem is, I know what I can and cannot do, and have better
things to do than mope around wishing for an impossible clone of some
cute toy that you've fell in love with on another platform.

   What the heck is wrong with HyperCard/HyperStudio, anyhow? They're
both perfectly functional programs that work and do a nice job at it.

>My idea was to use HTML files on that disk together with some sortt
>of browser for them. Yes, a  GRAPHICAL Hrwoser with all the bells
>and whistles! So lynx really isnt�t the reight thing, nor is any
>text editor (sorry, Nathan).

   You still haven't answered this fundamental problem: Without a
Second Sight board for the GS, the graphics _SUCK_. I've yet to see a
halfway decent gif viewer that can put graphics into 640x200 mode and
not make the picture look totally atrocious. I've yet to see a Jpeg
viewer that doesn't take forever and produce decent color output.  If
someone wrote routines to do these and released them to the public,
they could be included in a project without too much trouble. But,
there's very little darn good GS routines available for free or near
free.

>Why use HTML  for a news letter? Because we also want to put exactly t
>the same stuff on our Web Server!

   Why not just tell everyone to connect up to your web server? Cheaper
than sending out disks every month, no?

>But as it looks like (thanks to all who responded) there isn�t even
>any plan to develop such a thing anywhere (even though lots of
>source code are available for free on the Web)...

   If you think all this source code is going to help you, go ahead
and download it and give it to a programmer. A lot of bloated,
inefficient code that will be fun to try and get to compile, let alone
work on the GS very well. Raw unix code is a real pain to get to work
as a text application; the way unix boxes do graphics is so far
different you'd have to rewrite everything from scratch anyhow.

   Source code on the net somewhere isn't going to solve this other
fundamental issue on the GS: there is no formally released tcp/ip
support. Yes, it's in beta, but if I released a program that required
something else that was unavailable, that's a real good way to limit
the market. Are you going to make everyone in your usergroup get
slip/ppp accounts to view all the links for pages you didn't
distribute on disk?  Why not just have them get a dumb (vt100)
connection to some internet provider and have them run Lynx from
there?

   Drop by comp.sys.apple2.programmer one day, and ask why the
ultracool unix utility X hasn't been ported. Compiler bugs are one
thing, lack of a lot of full-time programmers who could do the work,
very sloppy coding by the original programmers (hint: if you think
that PC programs are bad in requiring twice as much ram, processor
muscle and HD space every year, unix programmers have been in the
business for longer than them, and have worse code), and everything
else. 

   There's no plans for me to do a GS browser because there's no
use. Native GS hypermedia tools work just fine, and trying to get an
application that expects to run on a computer that is 10-1000 times
more powerful than the GS to actually run is a nightmare. I've got
some pet projects that I _want_ to do, and will get personal
satisfaction from them, even though fewer people might use them than
some WWW browser that nobody'd pay shareware for.

   Programmers have lives. We are not slaves to the mindless masses
who MUST HAVE TOOL X OR THEIR WHOLE EXISTENCE IS MEANINGLESS. The
Apple II has always been underpowered, and we have survived by making
_better_ tools, not trying to make the latest hog run on our home
machines.  If you want a programmer to do something, you'll have to
spark the interest of enough folks to get off their butts and actually
do something, but that hasn't happened for years.

   Consider this: I worked off and on for 6 months on Swatdisk. At the
same time, I had a job on campus working for a prof in turning the
results of scientific simulations into pictures and movies. Then, I
was making $9 an hour. To date, for Swatdisk, I've received a total of
_4_ payments for it. I could have made far more money by spending just
one more hour a week at work. (Well, they do have limits on how many
hours undergrads can work, and I was already pushing the limits, as
well as GPA concerns :)  

   What motivated me to work on Swatdisk? It was a cool program that
didn't exist elsewhere, and was useful _to_me_. As you can see from
above, I'm jaded about the expected monetary returns from GS work, so
there's only one other possible motivation: I'm writing the programs
for my own use. If others find it useful, cool, but if someone wants
something else that's "cool" and I have no interest in it, they'll
just have to look elsewhere.

   Of course, I speak purely for myself. If someone else wants to do
such a thing, they can go right ahead. I wish them the best of luck.

Nathan Mates
-- 
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
# And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the
# Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in 
# parables" Mark 4:11, NRSV