Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Macintosh handles Message-ID: <8097@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 22 Jul 89 18:00:07 GMT References: <1044@clinet.FI> <8043@hoptoad.uucp> <1409@unix.SRI.COM> <8071@hoptoad.uucp> <1294@intercon.UUCP> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco Lines: 69 In article <8071@hoptoad.uucp>, tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) writes: > TextEdit does a lot of really nice stuff, and I > just wish they'd make it useful for something other than the Dialog > Manager. In article <1294@intercon.UUCP> amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker) writes: >Yup. It's funny sometimes. Apple provides this nice Toolbox so that >no one has to reinvent the wheel for the user interface, but everybody >still has to reinvent (incompatible) wheels for: > > Non-trivial text editing Yep, not to mention just ordinary text display. TextEdit isn't even powerful enough to be used for off-the-top capture capabilities with the new Communications Toolbox. > Indexed files / simple databases Yes. As some of us have discussed in e-mail already, the new B-Tree Manager looks amazingly inflexible, with incredibly small limits on the size of data and keys, only one tree per file, and no apparent interface to the new remote database handling capabilities. A special purpose tool which is really useful only to HFS internals is being foisted off on us as if it were a general purpose tool. This is a remarkably close analogy to TextEdit, which is really useful only for the Dialog Manager, but which Apple pretends is a general-purpose text editing support layer. > Scrolling selection lists and tables Yep. The List Manager won't even draw lines between the cells for you. Much less will it cope with variable-width and variable-height cells, an absolute requirement for any serious database interface or spreadsheet front-end. I believe it also has some serious weaknesses in the area of horizontal scrolling, allowing only whole-cell scrolling, though I can't say for sure. It's not like there are any serious technical obstacles to providing these kinds of services, either. The problem seems to be that Apple insists on rushing out half-baked software support layers. The multiple revisions of the Script Manager and Sound Manager are good examples. But at least Apple is working to improve those. TextEdit was released half-baked and has only been enhanced in ways that do nothing to alleviate its fundamental flaws for any real application. The supposedly more powerful CoreEdit was quietly killed off, reportedly for political reasons. The List Manager has never been improved except for bug fixes and is less powerful than its forerunner, the list management in Standard File, in a number of significant ways (such as the lack of keyboard handling and the inferior "end of list" handling). >And so on. I realize that Apple can't be all things to all people, but >sometimes I wish that they did as complete a job on some of these things >as they did on Quickdraw or MacApp. I guess you can tell what things are >more fun to work on... So it would seem. Quickdraw is a good example of doing a support layer right. It really is quite clean and powerful. Windows, menus, controls -- these are all done pretty well. But when are we going to see the serious support that we would expect from an OS that requires two megabytes of memory just to run? -- Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com "Every year, thousands of new Randoids join the ranks. Most tend to be either too-rich self-made tycoons or picked-on computer nerds (the romantic, heroic individualism of Rand's novels flatters the former and fuels the latter's revenge fantasies)." -- Bob Mack, SPY, July 1989