Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!keith From: keith@Apple.COM (Keith Rollin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: icon dock Message-ID: <40769@apple.Apple.COM> Date: 6 May 90 21:47:44 GMT References: <1990Apr30.161035.24652@ucselx.sdsu.edu> <11287@hoptoad.uucp> <12508@wpi.wpi.edu> <1990May2.220210.7333@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <11313@hoptoad.uucp> Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA Lines: 68 In article <11313@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: > >There are three good solutions, both of which involve Apple obeying its >own rules by putting the icons into windows. Where's the rule that says icons have to be in windows? There's the rule that says that you shouldn't draw to the desktop, but the reason for this is precisely because the Finder is already using it for its own purposes. >Solution 2 is to have a new window definition procedure which makes >windows out of icons. This way, the visual appearance of the Finder >will not change at all, but the icons will come to the top of the >screen whenever the Finder becomes the frontmost application, again >obviating the need to "Set Aside" or similar awful and inefficient >workarounds. This is arguably the best solution. This is a solution that I tried to push for about a year ago. I thought that it would be really neat to have a window whose strucRgn was the outline of the icon. Then you could do sicko things like call DragWindow when you needed to move the icon around. However, it was pointed out to me that there were problems with this, indeed, with any scheme that allows icons to float all over the place. The problem is that any such floating icons would look like they appeared in any windows that were behind them. (This is aside from the obvious problem that you couldn't call DragWindow if you wanted to move more than one icon at a time.) For example, say my name was Pete Helme, and that I liked to put tons of applications and documents on my desktop. It would be possible, then, that those icons would appear to actually be in any open Finder windows beneath them. When the user later moved or closed the window, they'd get really confused when the icon stayed behind. So, OK. How about this then? Say we had some sort of...oh, let's call it a Layer Manager, for the lack of a better name. Then, we could make it so that all normal Finder windows would appear in the top layer, but that desktop icons would appear beneath them, but still above all other applications. Then you still have the problem of icons appearing to be in the windows of those other applications. I know that a lot of people wouldn't get too confused if they saw an icon in their MPW worksheet, but they might if they saw it in their MacDraw or MacPaint pictures. Still, I pushed the issue. "OK," I said, "how about if you made the icons really distinct, like, by putting a grey border around them. Fill out the 32x32 bit image with a grey background." However, this suffers in that a) there may not be the ability to do that if the icon takes up the entire 32-bit image, and b) you'd have to make sure you did the right thing when the user did things like have a color background, or picture desktop through some INIT. So, as you can see, there are more issue here than meets the eye. I haven't even listed all of the ones we've encountered. But you can be sure that we've looked into this a lot and have found the status quo to be better than the proposed change. I mean, what other excuse could we have? That we're lazy? Sheesh, we're rewriting the whole g**d*** Finder from scratch! Can that be characterized as lazy? That we don't know how to do it? I think that the solutions Tim iterated would be obvious to anyone. The only reason for our not doing it is that we tried it, and found it to be lacking. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keith Rollin --- Apple Computer, Inc. --- Developer Technical Support INTERNET: keith@apple.com UUCP: {decwrl, hoptoad, nsc, sun, amdahl}!apple!keith "Argue for your Apple, and sure enough, it's yours" - Keith Rollin, Contusions