| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ DISQUE ★ MAX DESKTOP ★ |
| MAX Desktop v1.0 Excel Software et A.M.S Ltd (CPC Revue) | MAX Desktop (Amstrad Computer User) | MAX Desktop (Amstrad Action) | Sampling the menus (Popular Computing Weekly) |
Is your computer a man or a mouse? Rupert Goodwins looks at MAX, the digital desktop from AMX and provides a guide to the fashionable jargon along the way. MAX is a desktop for your CPC. No, not the flatpack from MFI, carve undying luv for Sandra, spill the ink and stick the chewing gum type of desktop, more the hi-res graphic interface to computer sort. Load MAX. and instead of typing commands like LOAD and RUN you get to move an arrow about the screen. It might not sound like a great advance, but read on. The first thing you see on loading (via the old-fashioned RUN "MAX route) "the program is a fairly empty Mode 2 streen. At the top left hand corner sit three words and a little picture of a mouse. These are the pulldown menus. (One of the side effects of going upmarket to desktops is a proliferation of jargon of a quality and quantity sufficient to keep the most ardent acronymystic happy). Similarly, the arrow's real name is the pointer. It moves about the screen freely, going whither you would point it. You can move it by the cursor keys, a joystick or the AMX mouse. The mouse is the recommended option, as with it you can "point" by moving your hand in a similar fashion to the way you would move to pick up something from a physical desktop. And as the idea is to allow you to use your computer in the same manner as you would use a desktop full of pencils, files and oddments, this is why it all works better with a rodent. With the mouse, if you move your hand quickly the pointer moves quickly, and vice versa. It soon becomes second-nature. When you move your pointer over an area of screen containing a pull-down menu or an icon, you can choose (jargon, select) the action that the menu or icon represents by pressing a button (jargon, clicking) on the mouse. When you click on an object, it either becomes selected (you can tell because it changes .from a normal picture to reverse), or springs into action. With a pull-down menu, a list of associated options appear beneath it -move your pointer down to the option and click again, and the option hap-pens. Window winder For example, there is a pull-down menu labelled DISC. Click on the word, and the options Copier, Formatter, Sector Editor, Dir. Editor and Fast Tracking appear in a list. Move down to the Copier and click, and a disc copy program starts. You don't have to remember to type DISCCOPY followed by a string of magic letters and punctuation marks. The idea is that at each stage of the proceedings - the computer prompts you with all possible Choices. All you have to do is remember what it was that you wanted to do in the first place. You don't even have to be able to read. A shame, after all that time we've spent teaching the Ed that A is for Amstrad, and Mil isn't pronounced autobahn, but if you can comprehend simple pictures you can now drive a computer. The Apple Macintosh was the first massmarket computer to try and do everything by icons; and consequentially gained a :huge following in the advertising and "creative" spheres where a knowledge of English is a disadvantage. The icons in MAX are standard issue . - pictures of disc drives, printer and dustbin are all guessable graphics. The selection of exploding and imploding arrows, the overendowed Trivial Pursuits pie, the graphic equaliser and the sets of rectangles might need a bit of explaining. The rectangles represent windows. Yup, another word borrowed from reality. Windows are areas of screen that "open up" to display information, so if you select a disc drive, a window opens up to show the directory. One of the basic ideas behind the whole desktop concept (no wonder the ad people fell in love with the Mac -concepts, ideas and pretty pictures...) is that lots of things can be going on at once. On a CPC, where things can't actually happen simultaneously, you should be able to run something, then do something else, and finally go .back to the first something without having to abandon it at any stage. If you open a window, and it obscures an older window that you were playing with before, then the older window and ing associated with it is remembered by the computet. When you fnish with new window, you close it and yourself back in the older if nothing had happened, sing windows is done, as 'most erything else, by pointing and picking. Remember the Rectangles? These allow you to swap which window you are working on (the active window, jargon junkies), and shuffle through sets of windows when looking for something you opened a while back.
The sets of arrows expand or contract the active window (thus hiding or revealing what's below, and changing the work area). For example, if you're going through a disc, deleting old files as many files on screen at once as you can have. The graphic equaliser icon is the control panel. Click on this, and you get a set of options allowing you to choose mouse or joystick, screen colours and speed of operation, as well as personal preferences as to how exactly the menus work. The paper and ink colours are presented as a pair of sliding controls, ana on a monochrome screen allow you to change the brightness and contrast of the display in a very impressive manner. You cannot set ink and paper to precisely the same colour, which is a good way to become totally adrift in a graphic interface (you can't type in -commands blind!!! That Trivial Pursuit icon ... The rest of the icons mirror functions available from the pull-down menus. There is a very useful sector editor (the pie icon), which allows the brave to alter any byte on a disc, including the words in games to hilarious/juvenile (depends on your sense of humour) ends. It can also mess up a program completely. The Directory editor can mess up an entire disc completely, so merely brave hackers need not apply. Foolhardiness (or a backup) is a prerequisite. The editor can also rescue an erased or corrupted file, so it might just save your leathery hide one of these days. But you do need a good knowledge of make safe use of such powerful facilitie. The directory function was mentioned earlier. When you click on a disc icon, the files on the disc in the drive appear in picture format - a text file looks like a page of text, a Basic program like a listing, and so on. By clicking on the file of your choice, and then clicking on the RUN icon (a little man running) a program can be got going. Most programs will work from the MAX desktop, certainly I did not experience any problems, although the manual does warn that certain unspecified protected programs may have unspecified problems. Documentation Mention of the manual allows me to slip from descriptive to reviewer mode. The manual was a little annoying, for av number of reasons. The first is that I had to-look at it at all in the first half hour of playing with MAX. The main reason for having desktops is that they are completely obvious. You shouldn't have to think when using them, and they should never be so obscure in operation that you have to resort to a manual. MAX fell down a couple of times in this respect, the major problem being the RUN icon. In every single one of the many desktops I've used previously, there is a technique called double clicking. To run a program, you point at it and click twice in quick succession. And it runs. This doesn't happen with MAX, I don't know why, and it is incredibly annoying. And since I'm on my soap-box... Chock-a-block buttons The optimum number of buttons on a mouse is one. Any more, and things get confusing, and the whole idea of point and click gets murky. The AMX mouse has three buttons, and even though it's a well-designed and sleekly finished wee tim'rous beastie, it still has two buttons too many. A strong-willed software designer would treat all buttons equally, but MAX sometimes needs one button, and sometimes another. Resort to the manual? Well, you can try. Like I said, the manual was annoying. When I was slowly realising that double-clicking didn't work, I looked at the manual. Running a program, I was informed, is achieved by clicking on the program, and then clicking on the icon at the top left of the Control Icon window. Yer wot? Looking at the labelled picture of the desktop, there was nowt labelled Control Icons. The paragraph was labelled Function Icons, but there was nothing by that name either on the picture. In retrospect the Various Utilities window was guessable, and the stickman could have been running, but good icons don't rely on visual puns. Other moans include the fact that it knows nothing about roms, and also doesn't think a file of type DOC is a text file. You can't make it realise that, either. Neither can you associate a type of file with a particular program, so that when you try and run a .TXT file the desktop goes away and starts up your word processor for you. Smooth stuff But be still, AMX's racing heart. The rest of the desktop is wunderbar. The quality of the graphics is excellent, and full use has been made of the little known fact that the screen resolution^ in Mode 2 of the Arnold and that of the Macintosh are as near as dammit the same. It made me get the Windowlene and clean my green screen to do it justice (colour screens don't look quite as good, but that's Sugar's fault). | And the mouse/pointer action was so smooth, like writing with black chalk on white marble. Delicious. Similarly disc/sector editors are pretty indispensible, and alone justify the software. And the desktop environment really is the best way to make the most of discs. More than that depends on AMX. It would be nice to see them produce some documentation so that people could write Basic programs that used the windowing and mousing. They've done it for the Spectrum. And a ROM version of the program, that perhaps worked in slot 7, would be almost as nice as one that used any extra memory you had to beef up the copying and other functions. But even as it stands, I think it really must be counted as a major contribution to the CPC software canon.
Rupert Goodwins, ACU #8709 |
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Down the right hand side of the picture are grouped various sets of pictures. Only you mustn't call them pictures, 'cos everybody knows what a picture is. They are icons. Sounds much better.
