Newsgroups: comp.groupware Path: utzoo!utgpu!craig From: craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Craig Hubley) Subject: Re: Xerox Rooms Message-ID: <1990May29.033706.5681@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> Organization: Craig Hubley & Associates References: <1138200005@cdp> <1138200006@cdp> Date: Tue, 29 May 90 03:37:06 GMT The Rooms metaphor was based on some good basic research, so it isn't surprising to find its ideas present in some popular older systems as well... including those without the window metaphor. Xerox went through a number of other systems first, including Bigscreen (a huge space onto which you peer through a smaller window), before hitting on it. Henderson and Card did a superb presentation of the progression at CHI+GI'87. Only time I've seen a technical paper get a standing ovation... Bigscreen is back, horribly, on the Mac - an ill-conceived clone that moves the screen around to the unseen edges of the 'bigscreen' if your pointer hits the sides. Since the Mac likes to put certain important things, like the Trash can and main hard disk, at the far corners of the screen, and puts scroll bar active areas in the corners of windows, this means you are always doing it accidentally and throwing your screen off, especially if you have a full page monitor. The Mac also has lots of software (including system software) that will put moded dialogs right-in-the-middle of the screen (making it shift if the dialog is wide enough). Thank heaven at least the menu bar stays in the right place... but any interface based on pulldown menu bars simply doesn't work well with a big screen - you have to move your mouse from one side of the screen to another, every few seconds... probably making it shift. I think the thing started as a way to avoid the always-clumsy scroll-bar mechanism, and provide another way for getting around, if you didn't have a full page monitor. There is another solution to this, which is a Mac hack distributed free by Bill Buxton and Bill Gaver at CHI'90, so I understand, that lets a Mac have a trackball *as well as* a mouse... and lets you scroll with the trackball (in your off hand) as you point with the mouse. This seems to be the simplest solution, and seemingly the best analog to paper, where you often hold/steady the page/book with one hand and write with the other. In my own experience, I have found trackballs to be typically 10-30 times faster than typical scrollbars for finding a particular place in a text - where I have been able to use them. Rooms is another way to avoid artificial mechanisms like scrolling, of course, by saving various views of what could be the same object, for different task purposes. Wang's Freestyle uses another metaphor, the stapler, to 'group' windows. This is a very clear analogy to paper, and provides a lot of the same capabilities as Rooms. Some form of grouping and saving-of-state is necessary in window systems. I think if it were standard there would be less need for ugly half-solutions like bigscreens and scrollbars... Craig Hubley -- Craig Hubley ------------------------------------- Craig Hubley & Associates "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca ------------------------------------- craig@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu mnetor!utgpu!craig@uunet.UU.NET