CompuServe Messages

That your affort is exoended on long term improvements does not change the fact that you have a more direct interest in the numbers of Amiga out there. I merely point out that what you see as good improvements may not be seen by others in the same way. I think my comment was clear. I want more Amigas out there, but do not want it prostituted in order to get those numbers. Are you forgetting that in the early days of the Amiga, CBM had no choice (emphasize _NO_ choice) but to pay attention to profits? Are you forgetting that they worked on a _lot_ of bug fixes that affected WB and CLI users and application programs alike? The plain, simple fact of the matter is that you do NOT need to have attended CompSci classes in order to use the CLI, that there is literally NO learning curve in following instructions, and that an iconic interface is not necessarily the best thing to use for all purposes. Ease of use in business or novice (same thing, generally) environments is ideed important, but that is provided by the WB as it now stands. If a user only runs prepackaged, turnkey applications, it serves the purpose well, and it would be well for you to bear this in mind when you propose solutions to the use of the WB in lower level machine usage. You will be doing the users no favour by cluttering the screen with icons or text that may as well be shown in the CLI environment, unless that clutter is actively called by the user, when the necessary skills have been learned. In addition, you might take a look at some of the things that have developed because of work instigated by the CLI devotees that are of direct benefit to the WB user. Have you ever heard a WB user tell you that the WB is a lot more usable under FFS? So… keep putting down improvements in other areas of the machine if you wish. Put down the efforts of people who are developing applications in languages like ARexx, that will, eventually, bring a whole new level of user definable integration to the Amiga, that will benefit _everyone_, not just programmers and hackers. Has CBM not stated that they are pulling WB out of the ROM for 1.4 and extensively reworking it? But don't let that stop you from bashing them anyway. If they had listened to people like you, we would still have a system that was unusable because of bugs no matter how you tried to use it. Yes, you explained why you used IconX, and no, I did not miss the point. I do take exception to your bashing of an interim solution to the problems of WB. Would you rather have had 1.3 delayed even more? I can guarantee you that providing IconX took far less time than the complete rewrite of WB would have.