After installing 150MB of software - a /vast/ amount for DOS! - I got
a bare C:\> prompt at the end.
No version message, no free-memory display, no "Welcome, thanks for
trying FreeDOS!" message, nothing. Blank screen, C prompt. That is
about as friendly as a kick in the nuts.
Given that OpenGEM was installed & the system thus has a default GUI,
I was surprised that it did not run by default.
When I ran GEM, there were no links to any of this 150MB of programs.
I had editors, email programs, web browsers, games, all sorts going
past as I installed, but not a single one was linked anywhere visible.
OK, so, it is version 1.0, but that is not a great result. This is a
poor user experience, I feel.
I quite like OpenGEM; I am in the credits for it, as I was
peripherally involved in its development from day 1. I mostly did some
bug-hunting and a bit of documentation, as I am a very poor
programmer.
But just bare OpenGEM needs a bit more work.
I'd suggest, as a minimum, a tree of directories containing batch
files to launch the many and various bundled apps. OpenGEM could be
used, like its ViewMAX ancestor, to browse and inspect these and
choose ones. This would be trivial to implement & I'd be happy to help
with that.
Something like this, perhaps:
C:\
\-Apps
\- Editors
\- Games
\- Text-mode
\- Graphical
\- Internet
\- Email
\- Web
\- FTP
\- Chat
That's just a top-of-my-head first suggestion.
It might be an idea to also offer a set of text-mode batch-file menus
to navigate through these, for instance for systems with no mouse or
no graphics or Braille display users, etc. Again, happy to help
implement them; I did such things routinely in the 1980s on my
production systems.
--
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: [email protected] • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: [email protected]
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: [email protected] • ICQ: 73187508
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