Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: presentation manager
Message-ID: <89286.092706UH2@PSUVM.BITNET>
Date: 13 Oct 89 13:27:06 GMT
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 37

I saw a demo of OS/2 and Presentation Manager, and though I didn't take
notes there were some things I thought the Amigoids might be interested in.
Maybe this has been discussed to death in a thread that I haven't followed,
so I'll try to be very brief.

The demo was running on a ps/2 m. 70 with 6 MB of main memory.

Mainly what I want to describe is the user interface, and some simple ways
that it differs from Intuition.

Each window had its own menu bar, within the window.  When the user clicks
a choice on the menu bar, a pull-down menu appears, with a default choice
highlighted.  The user clicks again on his choice and the pull-down menu
goes away.  The window is resized by dragging on any part of the border
in any direction.  This looked pretty handy.

On the desktop, there was an ARRANGE menu, with choices Tile and Cascade,
which straightened up all the windows currenly open.  This seemed pretty handy,
too.

At the desktop, there is an application that feels a lot like the PD
program, Browser.  That is, windows showing the filenames in directories
which can be copied, renamed, deleted, or executed using mouse operations.
The use of icons seemed to be reserved for what Amigoids call an
iconofied window.  That is, there is a running application, but if you don't
want its window cluttering things up, you close it.  The application stays
resident, but the window turns into an icon.  When you double click that
icon again, the windows reopen.

An interesting side effect of this is that icons have dynamic images.  For
example, there was a clock program that runs in a window, but when it
is iconified, the icon, which now has a tiny clock face on it, continues to
keep time.

All in all, I was pretty impressed.  Of course, I have no idea if it is
a complete kludge underneath, but from what I saw it improved on the
interfaces I know--Intuition, Mac, SGI (is that NeWS?).