Advices for the forseable future
Only 16 years separe our first Commodore-64 from the current [and
incredible in 1982] infrastructure we are now enjoying; we are proud
to survive after so many changes !.
Such a sustained rate of change will surely keep on through the near future,
but we will continue to deal with windows, buttons, mices...
Hopefully, those beasts possess the same basic behaviour (move, resize,
iconify, gain focus...).
So:
-
Keep your attention on the principles,
not on the window manager idiosyncrasies.
Even along the Microsoft's history, the 'look and feel' changed from
version to version, sometimes strongly (Win-3.11 to Win-95; Win-NT 3.51
to Win-NT 4.0).
Nobody knows what the major platform will be in 2005 !
We follow WordPerfect
from the 4.2 version; WP 8.0 is now available and WP
9.0 is announced for June 1999 :
-
please understand the underlying principles,
-
learn to use the HELP facilities, not the exact position of 'this' or 'that' button in the current
version...
-
Take into account our spartan support context
: consider to explore the dedicated environment built for you on LINUX.
It is a rich, robust and rewarding platform. It compares better to Windows-NT
than to Windows-95/98, with many fundamental superiorities (a fact recently accepted by Microsoft)
