Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Hooks and ladders
Message-ID: <128072@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 18 Nov 89 00:53:41 GMT
Article-I.D.: sun.128072
References: <4299@nigel.udel.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 36

The Amiga is *more* customizable than the Macintosh and it multitasks so
you needn't worry there. In fact there are a zillion things you can explore
in an Amiga and not once get bored. When you find a bug (and there are a
few) send it to cbmvax!bugs and lo and behold it will get fixed! They seem
to run about an 18month release cycle. 

The posting asked a another question which Amiga users like to snicker at
which is "Will I still have access to a zillion 'desk accessories'?" to
which the smug Amiga person will reply "We call them programs, and generally
they are all available all the time. If you have the memory, you can run
this program." It's sort of a wild concept for some users. But a friend of
mine who is a Mac fan brought up the point that the reason DAs were neat 
was that they were sitting on the menu bar waiting to be accessed at any
time. My initial response was that on the Amiga you could, if you chose,
collect all of your favorite little utility programs and put them in a 
drawer on the RAM disk and then just start one when you wanted to use it.
Not quite as convientient as the menu selection but close. Of course there
are hacks that let you add things to the menu bar, and some programs even
have commands available to have things added to their menu bar. One can
do this much more easily in the 1.4 workbench environment I understand. 
But what struck me was that what I would *really* like to do would be to
have ready access to resident programs. [You know the ones with a shared
text segment so that you don't have to have a copy in the ram disk and a
copy executing when you run them.] Now it seems a wee bit silly to have 
a resident icon, but I thought "Why not?" Can we make a workbench accessible
user interface to the list of Resident programs? Any ideas on what it
should look like? Generally resident programs are for the CLI environment
and don't know about WB parameter passing, would it help to have some sort
of notification on the resident command ? I was thinking that if you dragged
a tool icon out of it's disk drawer window and onto the backdrop that should
make it resident. Then you could just click on it and go. Comments? Ideas?

--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.
"If it didn't have bones in it, it wouldn't be crunchy now would it?!"