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Comment by rahoulb | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I loved about RiscOS was a small UI feature. There were no open or save dialogs. Instead, when you saved a file, it minimised to its icon and then you dragged it to the relevant folder. To open a file, you located it and double-clicked.

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For me drag-and-drop is not complete without also being able to save by drag-and-drop. On RISC OS you can save your files by dragging the file icon to the place you want to save your file. This can be a directory window, or it could also be another app icon on the taskbar, or an open app window.

This way it is possible to create workflows where you have small specialized apps that complement each other. You would open a file by dragging it to the first app, edit it, drag the result to a 2nd app do some more editing, then drag the result to the next app and so on and save only the final result back to disk. This is basically supporting the Unix philosophy of having many small programs that do one thing well, and combining them to achieve the desired result.

Instead what we now mostly have on all platforms are huge monolithic programs that try to cram every possible feature into a single package. One reason for this, is in my opinion, that a workflow that is similar to the RISC OS way of dragging from app to app is just to cumbersome on systems without drag and drop between apps, as every step one has to go through the filing system, saving a file by browsing through a directory tree and browse the directory tree again when loading the file in the next app.

iOS (particularly iPadOS) seems to get this about right. Copy / paste / sharing seems to work very well for various work pipelines I use. I rarely if ever touch the filesystem.

Good point.

I tend to use my iPad as my primary computer - and once you get your head around the fact that everything runs off the share menu it's basically the same concept, without the physical dragging.

Yeah same here on the primary computer front. It's certainly the best hassle vs results computing device I've ever owned.

One of my favourite things about RISC OS was the font manager: At the time, it was normal for every application to manage its own fonts (Macintosh may have been an exception), but on RISC OS, fonts were shared between applications. Not only that, but the same renderer was used for screen use and printing, so you really had WYSIWYG, unlike the Mac, which used different rendering on screen and paper (using PostScript for printing and something else for screen use), which resulted in subtle differences, including things that lined up perfectly on screen being not even closely lined up in print (that hit me several times when using the university Mac). Furthermore, the screen renderer used anti-aliasing, so edges would not appear as ragged (on the fairly limited screen resolution), and allowed characters to be positioned at quarter-pixel resolution. And you could scale fonts to any size, as they were rendered from cubic Bezier curves.

This was 1988. TrueType for Mac was not until 1981, and it used quadratic Bezier curves, which are inferior to cubic, and AFAIR did not use anti-aliasing and the hinting system was inferior to that used by RISC OS.

I really wish Acorn had licensed their font technology to other companies, but like many other of their technologies (such as Econet and the video codec used by RISC OS) Acorn developed these for their own use only. It is almost a miracle that the ARM processor escaped the Acorn-only fate of so many other technologies.

Yes! This sort of universal drag-and-drop is something I've been hoping other OSes would pick up on, but you only ever get part-way implementations.

I liked that but sometimes it was a pain in the butt. Particularly if you'd forgotten to open the destination directory window already and the save thing was down 3 levels of menus.

Indeed. RiscOS embraced the file/folder metaphor in a way that modern UIs could really stand to learn from.

I really wish someone would pick up and modernize the ROX Desktop -- which is the Acorn RISC OS UI, on top of Linux.

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/

It would partner really well with a distro such as GoboLinux or possibly even sta.li.

I think it'd be a good fit for Hello [0], AppDirs and AppImages being very closely related, but I don't think probonopd agrees, sadly.

[0] https://github.com/probonopd/hello

Yes I also thought this was great, and I still ofetn think it would be nice to have it back. I already have my folder open in Finder or Explorer, so my no let me drag it there to save.

I guess you kind of have the same thing in mocOS with the proxy icon.

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