Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!ghoti+
From: ghoti+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Adam Stoller)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: Re: Dear Saint Andrew...
Message-ID: <4adl8zi00as90GIEh_@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 20 Jul 90 14:16:31 GMT
References: <0adTPN8B0TlkM4PEF=@zany.EuroPARC.Xerox.COM>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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[This Message vs Marked Messages]
Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 19-Jul-90 Re: Dear Saint Andrew...
Nathaniel Borenstein@thu (4870+3)

> Yeah, the thing is that there are times when the choice isn't obvious. 
> For example, sometimes people mark things as they're reading a folder,
> planning to deal with them en masse at the end.    So they're reading
> the Nth message, with K marked so far, and they say "delete".  Now, do
> they mean delete this Nth message that I'm reading at the moment, or the
> K messages that are already marked?

I was about to write the same thing - even with the ability to (a)
Undelte all those messages you just accidently deleted, and (b) the
ability to Clear Marks and then Restore Old Marks -- Suppose instead of
Delete you chose Print with 100 messages marked, when you only wanted to
print the one you were looking at -- it's not always something that can
be easily cleared up (especially for users who are not that involved
with computers and the workings of programs)


Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 19-Jul-90 Re: Dear Saint Andrew...
Lennart Lovstrand@Xerox. (15952+1)

>>> I wish there was support for setting tab stops!  [What no tabs??!  You
>>> must be joking!]

>> Right.  But look at what named tabs did to Bravo, in the old days: made
>> it almost slow enough to be unusable.

> Huh?  But that was on ye olde Alto, yes?  So why should it be impossible
> (or even hard) to have efficient tabs on UNIX workstations today when
> all the Mac apps has it on smaller machines?  If Andrew is beginning to
> show it's age, maybe it's time to perform a substantial rejuvenation.


In my limited experience with Mac's (i.e. those with the built in
monitor - not any with large external monitors) - tabs are relatively
easy because they've already defined the constraints of the "page".

The ATK was developed on top of a window manager on a 19" monitor -
allowing not only variable width fonts, but variable width (and height)
windows.  This puts a somewhat obvious fork in the road -- do you
constrain the contents of the window to fit some ideal, so that you can
easily determine where tab stops and page breaks are -- or do you make
use of all the space your given.

True, this may be a somewhat simplistic comparison - but considering how
different a piece of text can look if it's in a 3 inch wide window frm
how it looks in a 12 inch wide window - how would you support tabs
consistantly in both??

Mac's (at least those with built in monitors) had it much easier. Out of
curiosity, on a Mac if you make the window narrower than the full screen
(in something like MacWrite...)  - does the text wrap earlier, or does
it simply get chopped off at the right-hand edge? (or will it even let
you reduce the width of the window???)

Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 19-Jul-90 Re: Dear Saint Andrew...
Lennart Lovstrand@Xerox. (15952+1)

>> AMS doesn't at present maintain more than a high-water-mark within a
>> folder saying what messages you've seen, so messages are, by default,
>> sorted by arrival time since that's the only way AMS can show you the
>> ones you haven't seen yet.  .......

> I'm confused.  Do you by "seen" mean the same as "read"?  Because I
> thought each individual message was flagged when I read it, which would
> allow me to have "gaps" of unseen messages in a folder.  At least, so it
> appears.

"seen" is correct in terms of meaning "shown the caption of"

In a personal mail folder you may have many messages which you were
shown the captions for, but which you did not read - the
"high-water-mark" points to the last (or just after the last) caption
you were shown when you last looked at the captions for that folder
[unless you specifically set the mark earlier].

In a public bboard folder - all messages prior to the last one shown you
are considered as "read" (whether or not you actually did read them),
but the "high-water-mark" still points to the last caption you were
shown when you last looked at the captions for that folder.

--fish