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| Brandon | Costa .9.8To start off, I'd like to say that Costa is what a GUI should be, a nice looking shell used to launch other applications. But most of the time we get caught up making other applications and it becomes less of a DOS Shell and more of a fake OS.
Costa is an almost perfect DOS Shell, but lacks on the fake OS side of things with only 2 basic applications included.
The desktop is Costa's killer app, and thats not something that happens much anymore, we are less concerned with helping people get to their apps and more with making all encompassing systems. In its default configuration, when you click an icon on the desktop a menu (similar to the right click one in other OSes) pops up, which I found a little annoying, but the menu is animated and works well, so I give Jacob credit for showing it off instead of making the user hunt for it. I opened config and it was easy to turn off.
Costa's look is basically like an other screen 12 GUI, and it has a lot of color themes in case you get tired of the same look (my favorite theme is Fantom)
I really can't complain about anything, except that I wish Costa had more bundled apps, because the quality of what is there is super and the only way for it to get better is to add more apps. What is there is flawless.
I guess I better get out QB and the Fun500 source, my desktop looks like its from the middle ages compared to Costa's.
Oh, and guys try it out and post your own comments, feedback is the only way to get things the way you'd like them. | 2009-10-11 | 1:10 PM |
| aguma | Re:Costa .9.8The textboxes don't scroll, and it would be cooler with more apps, and the tic tac toe computer isn't very smart (well, that's not much of an issue), but it's professional and "bugless" and useful and customizable. Overall good job! | 2009-10-12 | 4:41 PM |
| jasonwoodland | Re:Costa .9.8IF LEN(TEXT$) > MAXLEN THEN
GPRINT TBX, TBY, RIGHT$(TEXT$, MAXLEN)
ELSE
GPRINT TBX, TBY, TEXT$
END IF
FOR THE TEXTBOX | 2009-10-12 | 10:29 PM |
| ysft | Re:Costa .9.8The problem with DOS is that it can't multitask. This is where what you refer to as "fake-os" comes in. Say you're learning QBasic from a text tutorial. You would want to have your QBasic IDE open while looking at the tutorial with EDIT or something. DOS can't do that by itself.
As for a shell, I perfer a text shell. They can be pretty powerful, like the unix shell. Much more flexible and powerful then any GUI I've seen.
The only thing left I think would be a nice graphical interface to manage files with multiple windows/tiles and drag and drop. That would be a great DOS GUI, but not easily achievable. | 2009-10-15 | 11:29 PM |
| JacobPalm | Re:Costa .9.8[quote]Costa is an almost perfect DOS Shell, [b]but lacks on the fake OS side of things[/b] with only 2 basic applications included.[/quote]
Costa was never intended to be a "fake OS" - it's a DOS shell which comes with a few accessories, and that's all it is.
That said, I've added scrolling textboxes to my todo-list. It should be fairly simple to implement.
While I'm at it, I've added a couple of things to the library I'm using to write the accessories and the desktop (the library which will be released as a QLB at some point). Most notably I've added a quite flexible inputbox function, not very unlike the one in Visual Basic (only with the option to show an icon, too). | 2009-10-24 | 6:51 PM |
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