3 ms·

Nothing was quite so cool as 'pulling down the screen' to reveal another screen behind it. even with different resolutions at that!

harel 13y ago
That! Go explain that to a EGA PC user at the time, that I could actually have 2 different resolutions on one screen at the same time.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  I would try to explain it to people - and even show them in person - and would inevitably get 'why would I want to do that?'. And that sort of was a fair question, which I still don't have a good answer for. It really reinforced its position as a niche tool computer vs general purpose, rightly or wrongly.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Back then it was useful. E.g. I'd have my Workbench running at 640x256 so I could get 80 column text, and Deluxe Paint might be running in 320x256 at the same time. Often I'd pull down a screen to check on something else that was running. Many graphics apps also used it explicitly to be able to present e.g. a palette or toolbar at one resolution regardless of the resolution/graphics mode of the image you were painting at the top of the screen. But notice the full-screen applications are now "new" again, and the top menu bar has spread beyond the OS X holdout (e.g. Ubuntu now uses a global menu bar for the most part). And on Android there's the pull down notification screen, and lots of hacks to run two applications side by side. So much for "why would you want to do that?" - the use cases answers the question: Because the work spaces we have are too small, and just like we sometimes will arrange papers on a desk so that some are partially obscured to optimise which part of the rest shows, so it is useful for desktops/screens. But this is/was a problem for the Amiga in general: So much of the functionality becomes obvious but possibly hard to explain once you've used it for a while, but is not even apparent or in many cases not even well known to people who have not used it extensively. E.g. why in the world do I still have to install different archives and libraries for compression formats with different APIs? On the Amiga pretty much every bizarre compression format under the sun is supported by an XPK library, meaning every application that supports XPK can transparently support that format. Meaning, again, that if you want to, you can pick and choose any compression format you want to compress your files on disk, as there are filesystem handlers that supports XPK.

harel 13y ago

That! Go explain that to a EGA PC user at the time, that I could actually have 2 different resolutions on one screen at the same time.

mgkimsal 13y ago
I would try to explain it to people - and even show them in person - and would inevitably get 'why would I want to do that?'. And that sort of was a fair question, which I still don't have a good answer for. It really reinforced its position as a niche tool computer vs general purpose, rightly or wrongly.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Back then it was useful. E.g. I'd have my Workbench running at 640x256 so I could get 80 column text, and Deluxe Paint might be running in 320x256 at the same time. Often I'd pull down a screen to check on something else that was running. Many graphics apps also used it explicitly to be able to present e.g. a palette or toolbar at one resolution regardless of the resolution/graphics mode of the image you were painting at the top of the screen. But notice the full-screen applications are now "new" again, and the top menu bar has spread beyond the OS X holdout (e.g. Ubuntu now uses a global menu bar for the most part). And on Android there's the pull down notification screen, and lots of hacks to run two applications side by side. So much for "why would you want to do that?" - the use cases answers the question: Because the work spaces we have are too small, and just like we sometimes will arrange papers on a desk so that some are partially obscured to optimise which part of the rest shows, so it is useful for desktops/screens. But this is/was a problem for the Amiga in general: So much of the functionality becomes obvious but possibly hard to explain once you've used it for a while, but is not even apparent or in many cases not even well known to people who have not used it extensively. E.g. why in the world do I still have to install different archives and libraries for compression formats with different APIs? On the Amiga pretty much every bizarre compression format under the sun is supported by an XPK library, meaning every application that supports XPK can transparently support that format. Meaning, again, that if you want to, you can pick and choose any compression format you want to compress your files on disk, as there are filesystem handlers that supports XPK.