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From: gourdol@imag.imag.fr (Gourdol Arnaud)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Open Finder
Message-ID: <17412@imag.imag.fr>
Date: 26 Jan 91 00:29:49 GMT
Reply-To: gourdol@imag.fr (Gourdol Arnaud)
Organization: IMAG Institute, University of Grenoble, France
Lines: 49


I have a question about what Apple is planning for future Systems
(when I say future, I mean in the next century, when System 7 is 
released :-)

The Finder 7.0 is (IMHO) a great improvement over old Finder.
However, as noted recently on the net, it's still not perfect.
I was wondering if Apple was planning to open this Finder, as it did
for the Mac a few years ago. 
What I mean is: will third parties be able to add features to the
Finder without doing incredible marvelous hacks. For example,
will it be possible to add new menu commands or new features thru
the drag and play interface.
I think the orignial project of the NPA (New Print Architecure)
was to allow to drag a document onto a printer icon and have it 
printed. Fine. But could it be possible to have other icons to
which the user could drag icons and that would do something
to it. For example, one could imagine a mail system working 
this way: just drag icons to a mailbox, a dialog appear requiring
address to send the document and zip, it's sent. Double click
the mail box to see incoming mail.

One could also imagine a REAL Macintosh Programming Environment
working this way (Note: I *HATE* MPW and I think it's the worst
product Apple ever did). You could drag your C files into
the icon of a C compiler or your project Makefile into a Make
Icon.

I'm sure one ca find plenty of good use of this kind of feature.
Of course, I presume Apple already though about it (those guys
are really thinking much ;-) and found some unsolvable issues
in user interface that make it impossible (altough I would 
be curious to know which). Anyway, this would allow third-parties
to build the Finde Extension they want.

(By the way, would be nice if there were clean way to
build system extensions)
(While I'm on my wish list, could it be possible to:
 (1) Rewrite a clean ROM (I mean consistent)
 (2) Rewrite the associated doc in a coherent set
(as you'll probably be selling RISC Mac before the end of 1992,
 it would be nice if you'd do MORE than writing an emulator)))))

Arnaud.
-- 
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 /                      // Via AppleLink: Gourdol@imag.fr@INTERNET# /
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