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From: ali@rocky.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: problems with the amiga user interface...
Message-ID: <175@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 11-Mar-87 12:48:41 EST
Article-I.D.: rocky.175
Posted: Wed Mar 11 12:48:41 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Mar-87 00:34:19 EST
References: <50@mit-prep.ARPA>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Distribution: world
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 49

In article <50@mit-prep.ARPA> tmb@mit-prep.ARPA (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>Below, you will find a sundry collection of things that bother me about
>the Amiga user interface, the windowing system, &c., from a user's
>point of view. I hope that if people on the net make sufficiently
>loud complaints, Commodore may fix some of these problems in later
>releases of the operating system.

Most of the problems you bring up are not problems, just personal taste
preferences. For instance, some people, rather than having to click on
a window to activate it, would rather just move the mouse anywhere within
the window. That's the way Sun does it. I can't deal with that, because 
most of the time I'm not touching the mouse my cat is. Thank god he can't
click it! Another issue is activating a window as soon as you bring a screen
up front. There are cases where this might be undesirable --- When I am
debugging a program, for instance, I do tons of printfs to the CLI window,
and I use A-N/A-M to quickly go back and forth my application screen and
the debug output. I don't need the CLI window activated at that instant,
in fact, I might want to type things into my application while looking at 
the CLI window. 

Anyway, it either case, Intuition is flexible enough as it is to provide
users with the kind of interface they want. You need to set up a process
in front of intuition (ie, priority 21, say) and have it deal with various
events. Then this process could send OTHER events to the appropriate
tasks. For instance, such a process could trap mousemove events and as soon
as it detects that the mouse is over another window it can send
deactivate/active messages to the appropriate windows. None of the
tasks themselves would know anything about the change. In fact, in a
recent BADGE meeting Jim Mackraz demonstrated such a program. (He was
actually using and demonstrating a library he is developing --- This
library apparently allows various tasks who want to hook event handlers 
in front of Intuition to interact gracefully rather than having them fight
over who is using F1 for what. If I understood correctly.)

Another program we saw was one that allowed the user to switch between
windows by just the touch of a key --- it allowed you to activate, in
sequence, all the windows in the current screen. 

I'm sure writing such hooks isn't all that easy, but the point is that
it can be done without mucking around with the OS or without C-A
having to release yet another version of the operating system. Also, on a
related topic, you can change many other things about the CLI --- 
For instance, I use an interlaced screen, but with a 15 by 8 font, black
background, and green characters (kind of like on my H19). The characters
look real sharp, and I get 80 of them per line, and 29 lines (I use
morerows.) With that choice of colors, I also get no noticable flicker.
And all programs still work fine. I love that kind of flexibility!

Ali Ozer, ali@score.stanford.edu,  decwrl!rocky.stanford.edu!ali