Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!adobe!heaven!glenn From: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: 2.0: Initial Reactions Message-ID: <371@heaven.woodside.ca.us> Date: 17 Dec 90 04:06:37 GMT References: <4490@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Reply-To: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) Organization: RightBrain Software, Woodside, CA Lines: 63 In article <4490@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> simsong@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Simson L. Garfinkel) writes: >* Icon is *gone*. I don't know how to make an icon now. Make a >backup of your program before doing the upgrade. No it's not. /NextDeveloper/Demos/Icon.app Maybe your dock just has /NextDeveloper/Demos/Icon (I think the .app is a recent development) and it just "seems" to be gone when you try to launch it from the dock. In fact, not only is Icon still there, it has become quite an amazing program, capable of all sorts of things (if you can only figure out the interface). You should see it in color. It never really was just an "Icon" program, but now it's even further from that. Image processing program is more like it. >A question to the net: how many people use Emacs and how many use >Edit? *don't post what you use, and please don't start a flame war!* >Just send me e-mail and let me know. I have a suspicion that emacs is >far more popular. I use Edit unless I'm hacking around in the shell and need to quickly edit a file without taking my hands off the keyboard, in which case I launch emacs. >In other news, I've gotten my News reader to the same level of >completion that Will Shipley's is. Oh, I've got posting almost >working too, Rich Text and all! The idea that I like best about >dealing with the Rich Text / non-rich-text problem was suggested by >Will: do a writeRichText: and a writeText:. Post the normal text, a >^l, and then a uuencoded, compressed, binary diff of the two. > >The only problem is that, well, I've done testing, and the overhead of >doing a uudecode, an uncompress, and a binary ed is just, well, too >high. So I think that well just post both the rich text. It's not >*that* unreadable. If you can't read RichText on your Sun, buy a >NeXT. Or I'll give you a copy of my Rich Text spec, and *you* can >implement all of the tools from scratch that come as part of the >package on the NeXT platform. I think that the best idea about Rich Text got lost in the shuffle. I think it was from Mike Dixon at PARCplace. The idea was to put the plain text first, then have a trailer with the RTF commands and some byte offsets into the plain text where they should be applied. This enables a single post of length equivalent to an RTF file that can be read as plain text by normal people, but software could pick up and apply the RTF commands from the end of the file before the file is viewed. Give that some thought; I think it's an excellent idea. There is one glitch I can think of, though, which is what you do when you want to include somebody else's post in yours, and you add > characters and all the offsets change. I guess you just generate a completely new RTF file with only a single trailer at the bottom. Anyway, I think that is the perfect solution for the RTF newsreader, and it will hardly add any bandwidth. Anybody else remember that posting? Could its original author amplify the volume and perhaps give us another example? I think it would work perfectly, with a little software thrown at it. /Glenn -- Glenn Reid RightBrain Software glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us PostScript/NeXT developers ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn 415-851-1785