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From: gore@nucsrl.UUCP (Jacob Gore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: problems with the amiga user interface...
Message-ID: <3500003@nucsrl.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 14-Mar-87 16:59:09 EST
Article-I.D.: nucsrl.3500003
Posted: Sat Mar 14 16:59:09 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Mar-87 03:54:55 EST
References: <50@mit-prep.ARPA>
Organization: Northwestern U, Evanston IL, USA
Lines: 36

/ nucsrl:comp.sys.amiga / ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer) /

> Most of the problems you bring up are not problems, just personal taste
> preferences.

Yep.  Please read on.

> 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. [...]

I was kind of weary of bringing up the Sun's interface in this group, but I'm
glad you did it for me.  I don't know if this true of all models of the Sun,
but on Sun-3 (/160, in my case), SUCH OPTIONS ARE USER-CONFIGURABLE!  Run the
Defaults Editor, and tell it that you want your windows to be click-activated
(or whatever the option on the menu is).

I'm not trying to single out the Sun as having the model user interface; this
is just an example.  I have used other window systems that gave the user
options of how the interface is to behave.  And it is done in an easy way that
any end-user can handle, which I'm not sure can be said of the following fix:

> 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. [...]

Jacob Gore
Northwestern University, Computer Science Research Lab
{ihnp4,chinet}!nucsrl!gore