Mail Archives: opendos/1998/10/13/03:04:24
On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, abcsoft wrote:
|Sometimes a reference surfaces ( german opndos pages) about the DRI GEM
[...]
|It was very fast and more simple and of course did less. When we had to
[...]
|As we once did a port of the 2.0 version to Atari 520 ST in '87, I still
[...]
|Are there any plans of using this by Caldera ?
If Caldera wanted to include a GUI with DR-DOS, their best be IMHO
would be to approach New Deal Inc. about the New Deal Office GUI.
While New Deal wasn't written by DRI, it might as well have been.
There are no compatibility issues between the two whatsoever, and in fact
certain features of New Deal *require* DR-DOS. Specifically, New Deal is
TaskManager-aware and integrates itself with TASKMGR.EXE. DOS programmes
in the background show up in New Deal's running applications list and you
can switch to them with a single mouse click. Simply double-clicking on a
DOS programme inside New Deal's NewManager makes New Deal create a new
task for it. When you launch a DOS programme or create a new command
prompt from within New Deal, New Deal politely moves itself to the
background and brings up the DOS task full screen. New Deal now shows up
as a DOS task in DR-DOS's TaskManager menu. New Deal is the ultimate DOS
programme launcher because of this TaskManager support, IMO. New Deal has
even extended the capability of TaskManager. If you open a new command
prompt from within New Deal you can type "exit" at the prompt to kill the
task, something that you can't do if you start the task from the DR-DOS
task-switcher menu.
The New Deal GUI runs almost as fast as GEM, thanks to its underlying
system code being written almost completely in assembly, but is a lot more
fully-featured. New Deal will run on anything from an 8086 or up, but
really flies on a 386SX/16 and up (having at least a meg of RAM really
helps, but it'll run in 640k if you want to punish it :)). New Deal can
execute programmes out of the first one meg. of memory, too, so its worth
remapping shadow memory as upper memory blocks.
It's designed to be user interface independant, meaning you could write
a new UI and all the applications would automatically adapt to it because
its all handled through system calls. There are UNIX Motif and
Presentation Manager interfaces currently available for it, and at least
one more in the works (guess what it'll look like :)). The existing
user interfaces are very flexible and can be made to look like other UIs
with some tweaking. I've been able to make Motif, for example, look like
either Win 3.1 or Win 95 through adjusting options regarding the layout of
gadgets. New Deal also has an "Express", menu which is what Microsoft
modelled Win95's "Start" menu on so they're extremely similar.
New Deal Office comes with, as its name suggests, a complete office
suite (word processor, data base, spreadsheet, graphics programmes,
communication programmes, and NewBanker which is like Quicken). Most of
the office suite is also written in assembly, but some of it is written in C.
If you want more information, check out:
www.newdealinc.com
Caldera and New Deal strike me as being in similar situations. Caldera
could use a good office suite for its product, and New Deal need an
underyling DOS to provide a file system for it. They need each other,
when it comes right down to it, and both of them are starving for
publicity. I can only see benefits in them teaming up.
Steven Hurdle
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