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From: ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: problems with the amiga user interface...
Message-ID: <190@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Sun, 15-Mar-87 17:48:44 EST
Article-I.D.: rocky.190
Posted: Sun Mar 15 17:48:44 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Mar-87 06:38:12 EST
References: <50@mit-prep.ARPA> <3500003@nucsrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 41

In article <3500003@nucsrl.UUCP> gore@nucsrl.UUCP (Jacob Gore) writes:
>Ali Ozer writes:
>> 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 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, & tell it that you want your windows to be click-activated.
>   ... 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:
>>  ... 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. ...

Sorry, I also didn't mean to sound like "well if you want to change the way 
you select windows, go ahead and write a program." If what I said above about
setting up a process in front of Intuition holds true, then it shouldn't
be too hard to write a Preferences-like program that lets you specify
the type of interface you want to use. This program would let you
choose among the various interface types, and then, upon save, would
inform a process that runs in front of Intuition what events to
watch out for and what to transform them into. 

Of course, I might be wrong here... Maybe having such a process
in front of Intuition would be far too expensive or maybe writing such
a process is not as easy as I think it is. If so, then the 
capability to alter the user interface defaults as probably should have
been a part of Intuition rather than something to tack on in front of
Intuition, afterwards, like I am suggesting. I would be interested in
hearing about the possibility of such a "general purpose" input event
controller from people who have done such programming...

Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu

ps. BTW, thanks for telling me about the "defaults editor" for the Sun.
    I don't use a Sun often enough, really, and I wasn't ragging on the Sun.
    I was just using the "default" Sun interface as an example, mainly
    because I saw it running on the Amiga (during Jim Mackraz's demo).