Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!stanford.edu!leland.Stanford.EDU!news
From: duggie@pengyou (Doug Felt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: what I want to see in future Apple computers
Keywords: PenPoint, NeXT, Apple
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.215528.25153@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 18 Jun 91 21:55:28 GMT
References: <5294@dirac.physics.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
Organization: AIR, Stanford University
Lines: 82

In article <5294@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> sho@gibbs.physics.purdue.edu (Sho  
Kuwamoto) writes:
>What I'm getting at is that the NeXT machine is *not* the kind of
>machine that will make us drool in four years.  None of today's
>machines are.

I agree.  You can't discount horsepower completely though.  100 Mips with lots  
of RAM, 24-bit color, real-time audio/video compression and decompression, and  
so on will make a lot of people drool.  But I take your main point to be that  
the programming model for today's machines, and their user interfaces, are  
starting to look a lot alike, and that these are not satisfactory.  Amen.

>The NeXT machine seems evolutionary to me instead of revolutionary.  I
>see it as a sleeker version of the mac.  It's faster, it has a neater
>class library, it runs on top of UN*X.

Interface builder is a small step in the right direction.  Mach, Display  
Postscript, and Objective-C are real plusses.  Evolution is a good thing, and I  
think NeXTs are very cool.  But they're not all that innovative, especially as  
far as user interface goes.

>The reason I bring all this up is that we have systems now which have
>user interfaces built by copying things from other systems for all the
>wrong reasons.  Before this tirade, I was talking about how IBM was
like a better Apple II.  In my view, the NeXT is a better Mac.

Copying things because doing otherwise is too great a risk.  Too bad.

>I think it's about time that someone shook up the house a little.  I'm
>not at all sure that Apple is the company to do it, either.  Maybe
>NeXT will provide us with the user interface for the 90s.  Hell, maybe
>it'll be Xerox or SRI.  My long term wish for the future of the mac is
>an ineffable vision of things being done "the right way."  I don't
>know exactly what I mean, but I have some faint notions.  We want to
>look at the mouse and decide if we want to keep that.  Then, we want
>to look at windows and decide if we want to keep them.  We go on down
>this list until we know what we like.

You should check out GO Corporation's pen-based operating system, PenPoint.
They were featured in BYTE earlier this year, February, I think.  There is also  
a book called "The Power of PenPoint" which gives a quick overview of  
PenPoint's main features.

PenPoint has plenty of innovations in terms of the user interface and the  
underlying object model.  The most obvious user interface innovation to my mind  
is the notebook metaphor, presenting all documents to the user as pages in a  
notebook.  The main innovation of the underlying model is treating portions of  
documents as instances of applications.  Thus a document (from the user's point  
of view) might contain both text and graphics, allowing for easy editing of  
each, and supporting seamless 'copy and paste' between the text and graphics  
portions of the document.  Yet the text editing code and the graphics editing  
code may be completely separate, purchased independently by the user in  
response to her needs for different functionality.

PenPoint also, of course, supports the pen as an input device.  It has  
universal object ids to uniquely identify documents across all machines running  
PenPoint.  It has communications protocols to support networking when the 'net  
conection' might be made or broken at random-- i.e. when you carry your  
portable machine out of range of the local radio-based network in your  
building.  It has a flat memory model in which you treat files as though  
they're in RAM, not on disk (because on most machines this will be the case).   
Lots of interesting ideas.  The risk, of course, is that the implementation may  
be deficient in ways that are not clear because not enough people have tried  
doing stuff with it yet.  I have not read real docs on the system, only the  
above-mentioned article and book, which are sketchy, and there are some details  
that are worrisome.  What is clear, however, is that GO is trying to be really  
innovative, and not just copy existing models of user interfaces and  
object-oriented toolboxes.  Bravo!

I doubt Apple would be willing to abandon the Finder and the  
application/document structure we're all so used to.  I think they should, but  
then Apple is not the company it was ten years ago.  I think we're going to  
have to look to smaller companies to take the risks the bigger players won't.   
Let's hope they get the breaks Apple got that helped the Mac got established.

>-Sho
>-- 
>sho@physics.purdue.edu

Doug Felt
Courseware Authoring Tools Project
Stanford University