Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnewsm!mls
From: mls@cbnewsm.ATT.COM (mike.siemon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Text file madness: diagnosis & prescription.
Summary: point conceded
Message-ID: <8528@cbnewsm.ATT.COM>
Date: 14 Jan 90 04:11:00 GMT
References: <2706@aecom.yu.edu> <5900@ncar.ucar.edu> <1998@eric.mpr.ca> <1990Jan13.001703.24286@NCoast.ORG>
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 45

In article <1990Jan13.001703.24286@NCoast.ORG>, allbery@NCoast.ORG
(Brandon S. Allbery) writes:

> The Macintosh SE manual, page 169, third paragraph of the section labeled
> "Open".  Of course, I may be the only person in the world who actually *reads*
> manuals upon receiving them....

Well, no.  But guided by your remark, I find the equivalent paragraph on p.181
of my Mac II manual.  This encourages me to reread the manual, which I had put
aside, as my reading of it on first receipt left me with an impression that it
was wordy and uninformative.  I must note, sadly, that it has *no* indexing of
any kind, not even the (marginally helpful) permuted index listing in UNIX
manuals.  The paragraph in question even continues on to an answer for the
question that immediately came to my mind reading the paragraph Brandon cites:

	If you select more than one icon and choose Open, the Finder tries
	to open the first icon's application to work on all the other
	selected icons...

which I regard as well thought out -- except of course that it still cannot
cope sensibly with large file systems organized in many folders, and there is
still the problem of selecting arbitrary subsets within a large set of files
(the problem UNIX fumbles around by regular pattern matching in the shell; I
do not claim that the UNIX method is "the answer," but at least it provides
*some* help (coloring icons, or spatially distributing them goes partway to
the same sort of kludged answer on the Mac, as someone has pointed out.))

It is not clear to me whether I ever noticed the paragraph; certainly, by
the time I ever had a file *not* created by the application I wanted to use
(and hence almost certainly in a different folder) any trace of this option
had long since vanished from my head.  I do *not* have a photographic memory.
(And my acquisition of useful applications has been somewhat slow, due to
budgetary constraints :-))

Someone else in this thread mentioned the Macintosh Bible as a helpful source.
I've browsed through that a couple of times, and always decided to *not* buy
it -- a more randomly organized and useless collection of context-laden folk
recipes would be hard to find outside a medieval grimoire or a 1950s American
hobbyist's compendium of _Popular Mechanics_.

Again, my point in all of this is *not* that the Mac is "bad" -- it has many
elements of a good visual interface, and it has these by design.  The problem
remains one of generalizing the elementary operations that the Mac does well
so that they can encompass complex structures *without* requiring me to do
every bloody operation as a unique conscious effort.