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For what it's worth I remember a distinct feeling of being really frustrated with Warp's GUI. I don't remember the specifics, but one thing stuck out - it didn'

For what it's worth I remember a distinct feeling of being really frustrated with Warp's GUI. I don't remember the specifics, but one thing stuck out - it didn't have something as simple as "arrange desktop icons on the grid", so you'd end up with this mess on a desktop. The GUI might've been innovative, but it was inferior to Windows 95 and IBM didn't seem to care about that.

cturner 14y ago
As I remember it - you'd put your icons about where you wanted them, but they wouldn't be aligned pixel perfect. So you'd right click and see "arrange desktop icons on the grid" and think that must be it. But that would rearrange everything starting at the top left, like modern Windows does. i.e. Rather than doing what you needed, it would destroy ten minutes of painstaking layout. There was no way to do the assisted alignment you actually wanted. They'd pitched a fabulous, malleable, document-centric desktop. Technically it was all there. They didn't quite get it to the user. People who were fluent in C could probably have done some quick fixes and made it hum. I think this was in version 2.0, and I watched it go unfixed in 2.1, warp. Can't remember if it was broken in 4, think so. Good example of the way OS/2 dev focused on ticking feature checkboxes (3d icons! a different dock! obscure mainframe compatibility features that mainstream users will never care about!) not users.
Osiris 14y ago
Shadow's were pretty cool. It was a pointer to an original object (since the GUI was object oriented). If you deleted the original item, all the shadow's disappeared also. Microsoft implemented "Shortcuts", but those were files that pointed to another file, so deleting the original file just left around broken shortcuts. You could also use the Font panel to drop fonts into any application and it would change the UI font. Some apps actually saved that as a preference and remembered it on next startup but others didn't. I got eComStation running in a VM a while back and I realized that my nostalgia for OS/2 didn't quite match the reality.

cturner 14y ago

As I remember it - you'd put your icons about where you wanted them, but they wouldn't be aligned pixel perfect. So you'd right click and see "arrange desktop icons on the grid" and think that must be it. But that would rearrange everything starting at the top left, like modern Windows does. i.e. Rather than doing what you needed, it would destroy ten minutes of painstaking layout. There was no way to do the assisted alignment you actually wanted. They'd pitched a fabulous, malleable, document-centric desktop. Technically it was all there. They didn't quite get it to the user. People who were fluent in C could probably have done some quick fixes and made it hum. I think this was in version 2.0, and I watched it go unfixed in 2.1, warp. Can't remember if it was broken in 4, think so. Good example of the way OS/2 dev focused on ticking feature checkboxes (3d icons! a different dock! obscure mainframe compatibility features that mainstream users will never care about!) not users.

Osiris 14y ago

Shadow's were pretty cool. It was a pointer to an original object (since the GUI was object oriented). If you deleted the original item, all the shadow's disappeared also. Microsoft implemented "Shortcuts", but those were files that pointed to another file, so deleting the original file just left around broken shortcuts. You could also use the Font panel to drop fonts into any application and it would change the UI font. Some apps actually saved that as a preference and remembered it on next startup but others didn't. I got eComStation running in a VM a while back and I realized that my nostalgia for OS/2 didn't quite match the reality.