Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!bionet!arisia!roo!janssen From: janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: tvtwm is available Message-ID: Date: 5 Sep 90 01:19:13 GMT References: <1990Aug30.142709.1196@Solbourne.COM> Sender: news@parc.xerox.com Organization: Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 34 In-reply-to: toml@ninja.Solbourne.COM's message of 30 Aug 90 14:27:09 GMT Thanks, Tom! Nice bit of work. I hauled Stu Card over to look at it, and he immediately said, "I've seen that before!" We went back to his office, and he pulled out the Rooms article reprint from TOG[1]. Sure enough, on page 239 there's a screen dump of something captioned "BigScreen". It has 5 or 6 windows on it (InterLisp windows), and up in the top there's a little window, looking for all the world like a virtual desktop window on vtwm or tvtwm, but called an "overview". BigScreen is a precursor of Xerox Rooms. There's one idea in BigScreen that I haven't noticed in [t]vtwm. The user can place "labels" (rectangles with big text in them) around the screen surface. The labels are shown in the overview as little plus signs, and serve as registration points for the outline of the screen in the overview. The caption has one warning note: "This system was considered unsatisfactory because of the need to have the same window in more than one location in the workspace." Stu says it also got too confusing, as the little labels proliferated in the overview. [1] D. Austin Henderson, Jr., and Stuart K. Card, "Rooms: The Use of Workspaces to Reduce Space Contention in a Window-Based Graphical User Interface", ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 5, no. 3, July 1986, pp. 211-243. [Anyone interested in different ways to manage screen complexity should take a look at this paper, as it discusses several different techniques, and compares and contrasts them.] Bill -- Bill Janssen janssen@parc.xerox.com (415) 494-4763 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304