3 YEAR ITCH

Dick Pountain/29 July 1997/Idealog 36

I notice this is my 36th column for PC Pro, which means we've been doing this for three whole years. Such an occasion calls for some tempus-fugit-style cliche, and so I can't resist deploying my very favourite one, namely "time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." (This phrase was invented by natural language processing researchers, as a deadly example of how very far we still have to go before computers will be able to unravel the ambiguities of English semantics.)

But I digress. Anniversaries are traditionally the time to take stock, so I dug out my very first Idealog, and it turned out to be on the subject of Object Orientation and why it was taking so long for us to take any real advantage of it. Well, here we are three years later and of course Object Oriented operating systems are revolutionising the way we use computers in our everyday work. Not. In truth almost nothing has changed in those three years. Microsoft still appears not to have a clue what an OO operating system is about, and the only remotely Object Oriented operating systems around are BeOS and NextStep, which Apple looks likely to drag down to the ocean bed with it as it sinks.

So what exactly was I hoping I'd be able to do by now? Nothing very dramatic actually, just simple stuff. For example I'd like to have just one dictionary on my hard disk, and have it used by the spell checker in Word, and Ameol, and TextPad, and still be able to look up words in it like a regular dictionary, and be able to access it from my own Visual Basic programs (to check if a word is a valid English word) using just a single statement. Instead I have AT LEAST five dictionaries that duplicate most of their contents on my hard drive, and I can't access any of them easily from my own programs.

Then I'd like to be able to change the properties of objects on my screen in a meaningful way. I recently sent off my VAT accounts a week late because I failed to notice a reminder I'd put in my Pilot Desktop. Pilot Desktop displays 'To Do's in a boring and inconspicuous grey box at the bottom right of the window and if I had my way, I'd change that box so it had bold flashing white lettering on a red background. But I can't - or rather I can, but only if I don't mind all the my other windows using that same outlandish colour scheme which totally defeats the purpose. Pilot Desktop doesn't let you change its colours, and the only way Windows 95 lets you customise the screen colors is globally. (On the other hand it does let me associate the sound of a pregnant grasshopper with every file that I open, which is much more important.)

You're probably thinking "why is he picking on Microsoft again?", as it was the Pilot programmer who failed to provide any colour-customising code for that To Do window. Well, if Windows were anything like a real object oriented operating system, he or she wouldn't have needed to provide anything - I'd just right-click on the window and up would pop a Properties Inspector that would let me change the colours, font and many other attributes of just that window. An identical inspector would pop up for any other window or sub-window because it would be a system service that gets inherited by every program, requiring no effort on the application programmer's part.

Under a real object operating system, applications would rely on such shared system modules for most of their code, and so they would be small, rather than multi-megabyte behemoths. Rich text editing, relational database engine, spreadsheet grid, comms engine and font/bitmap editor would all be system modules shared between many applications. Having the database engine as a basic system module would have many consequences. For starters all applications that required persistent data could use the same file format and read each other's files - so I wouldn't spend half my life exporting data from Idealist into Pilot Desktop, or extracting fax numbers into DBF format for BitFax's address book. More important, having a database buried in the operating system would allow a file system with some intelligence: it could understand more data types than just text or binary; it would know what application created a file, and what other applications could open it; it could keep track of which modules every application used, and all their configuration data. Installing and removing new applications (ie. updating the database) would become a simple but fundamental OS operation, rather than being left to ropey third-party install programs. Characteristically Microsoft recognised the problem, but offers only a half-cocked solution with that grim parody of a database, the Registry.

By now I'd also hoped that I'd have a purely visual programming tool that let me automate tasks just by drawing pictures - it would let me inspect the insides of any application, like a pair of X-Ray Specs, and then draw 'pipes' to pump data from one application into another. Visual Basic started out along that road, and what a wonderful liberation it was at first. Somewhere along the road though it got bogged down in the inelegant swamp that is OLE, and now it just seems to get more complicated without getting any more powerful.

I guess the bottom line is that we will never see real object orientation in Windows, because it would involve a major change in the business model. Microsoft would have to fully decompose Office into a set of reusable ActiveX controls, and licence them to other software vendors at a reasonable price. And to do that, it would have to sincerely want competition.