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Second Mouse Button in NEXTSTEP
by JK on Tue 15th Jul 2003 22:53 UTC

Nice article, but I've got a couple of nitpicks.

Porting NEXTSTEP to x86 a couple of years before Windows 3.1 wouldn't have done NeXT much good, there were hardly any PCs that could have run it. People complained about having to upgrade their PCs to run Windows 3.1, yet NEXTSTEP had requirements higher than Windows 95. Even if you had a fast 486 with at least 16Mb RAM, very few PCs had the graphics capabilities needed for DPS and a GUI designed for a high resolution display. NeXT would have had to cut NEXTSTEP down and strip out most of it's features to get it running on the average early 90s PC.

Also, the reason the second mouse button is hardly ever used by NEXTSTEP apps is that you can use it to pop up the main menubar. This let's you hide the main menubar to save screen space, very useful if you're trying to use NeXTSTEP on a laptop.