Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!XEROX.COM!lovstrand.EuroPARC From: lovstrand.EuroPARC@XEROX.COM (Lennart Lovstrand) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Dear Saint Andrew... Message-ID: Date: 17 Jul 90 20:15:06 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 169 Dear Saint Andrew: While there are many things I like about Andrew as a user, there are also (maybe as many, I dare say) things I find annoying and frustrating when compared to other word processing or mail applications. This is sad, because it acts as a obstacle in promoting Andrew as the general office multimedia document system, one that otherwise would have a great potential in serving technical staff and administrators alike and bringing them together under the same roof. The features of Andrew that I like the most are probably the modular architecture of the toolkit applications, allowing almost anything to be embedded within something else, and the fact that multimedia documents are encoded in such a way they can be transparently shared between Andrew users via email. It is an incredibly powerful combination that not only looks & feels nice to use, but also opens exciting new doors to creating applications by object manipulation and the ability to distribute these with very little overhead. [For comparisons, the only other system that I know of that provides anything like this is Xerox Lisp with TEdit and Lafite, but that is reserved for the "privileged few" who have a Lisp machine on their desk -- and god how slow it is!] Now over to the not-so-good part. Over the last six months or so, I've been trying to collect notes on the things I'm not so happy with Andrew about. I've included most of these below as suggestions for improvements. Please see them as constructive criticism; any comments are welcome (especially, "but you can already do that!"). --Lennart [An Andrew ToolKit view (a raster image) was included here, but could not be displayed.] EZ and TextView (&c) I wish text selections would be "pending delete" [ie, automatically deleted when a new character is typed] in much the style of the Macintosh, Sun, and many Xerox environments. I wish I had M-X... I wish I wouldn't have to type M-@ to select a region [for further kill-region, etc.] -- it's really confusing when moving between ez and emacs. I really, really wish there was an UNDO in ez &c. I wish backup and checkpointing could be compatible with gnu emacs, ie. #foo# for checkpoint and foo~ or foo~n~ for old versions. I wish M-Del would put the deleted text in the kill-ring, as emacs does. I wish there was a M-T (transpose-words). I wish operations on text attributes (fonts, etc) would be available "on the same level" as opposed to explicitly embedded within each other. For example, one should be able to "unitalicize" foo in \italic{foo \bold{bar}}, giving foo\italic{\bold{ bar}}. I wish the caret wouldn't always take the font style of the previous character -- it makes it especially frustrating to try and insert a new word first on a line and discover that it took the font props of the previous line. [MS Word, MacWrite, etc. does this right] I wish the lookz menu would allow me to change the default style as well as the others (does it?) I wish I would be able to explicitly state that a certain piece of text should be 12 point Optima (or whatever) without having to create a random name for it and declare it using lookz. I wish there were indications in the margin about what kind of style [etc] the current para was. I wish there was support for setting tab stops! [What no tabs??! You must be joking!] I wish there was [wysiwyg] support for 16 or 8 bit fonts and accented characters in particular. I wish printing a document wouldn't be dependent on having troff -- most of the formatting is already done by Andrew, so why not just produce PostScript (or something DVI-like) right away? In general, I wish that ez would be on level with "real" word processors, such as MS Word, Frame, Xerox Viewpoint, etc. so that it could be a serious competitor. Graphics I wish middle button would do thumbing in the scroll bar [instead of bringing up the menu] -- grabbing the scroll bar with the left or right button is tedious and somewhat difficult when the text is large and the scroll bar very small. I wish there would be better graphical [paint, draw type] editors. I wish there was full color support, not just fg/bg colors. Messages & AMS I wish Messages wouldn't distinguish between operations on the selected message and operations on all marked messages. Clearly, one is just a special case of the other (and by jove it's confusing to find which operations are supported where). I wish "Insert Header" would work even when the caret is in the body window Printing hidden headers as footnotes is a nifty idea, but I wish it could be turned off -- and when on, that they wouldn't be (left-and-right) justified! I wish Messages would show the messages in chronological order by the Date: field -- as opposed to in the order they arrive, since messages frequently get arbitrarily delayed during the transport and thus arrive in a jumbled order. (Or is this already supposed to happen? But I have messages that I wish Messages would give the choice of sorting order -- by date sent, date received, author, recipient(s), subject, etc. I wish Messages et al would allow me to directly control the appearance of the captions -- what is shown as well as how it is presented. (Seeing that a message is from "Mail D. Subsystem" instead of "Mailer-Daemon" is kind of amusing, but there are worse cases.) I wish Messages would allow me to have more than one "Message Draft" window open -- I often want to keep several of these around until I'm ready to send them off. I wish Messages et al would allow more than just RFC822 addresses -- even though my mail backend (sendmail) allows me to send both XNS and UUCP formatted addresses, Messages insists on validating them as "user@domain". [Is there a way to turn this off?] I wish Messages would support an easy way of following a branch of followups. I wish AMS would properly retain the envelope sender as found in the From_ line when retrieved from the user's mbox in /usr/spool/mail. As it is now, at least the "X-Andrew-Authenticated-As" header is prepended to the message, pushing the "From " line down into the body of the headers (where it at least should be changed to a Return-Path: to belong). I wish AMS wouldn't bluntly remove any user-supplied From: headers -- they're perfectly legal and perform the useful task of indicating a that the indicated sender is different from the (claimed) person sitting in front of the keyboard. I wish AMS wouldn't barf on a subject-less message (ugh!) I wish the mail applications would have been written to use a "real" mail service protocol, talking to a "real" mail server, instead of trying to rely on a global file system. General I wish tm wouldn't scroll 2/3 of the window each time the caret goes below the bottom of the screen. [Argh!] I wish there would be a (one) consistent extension language, not ELI here and NESS there etc. I wish there wasn't so many flags littering the system and making it virtually incomprehensible without investing I wish the code wouldn't contain quite so many magic constants and obscure defensive coding.