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From: hadeishi@husc7.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Workbench "multiple-files" or "attached-files" icons
Message-ID: <1685@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Apr-87 20:13:48 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.1685
Posted: Thu Apr 16 20:13:48 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Apr-87 03:21:48 EST
References: <1176@spice.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@husc6.UUCP
Reply-To: hadeishi@husc7.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 31
Summary: A possible glitch, people should beWare

Keywords:

In Re-hash:  I proposed a addition to the standard Workbench icon,
 the "attached-files" icon, which would basically be a single icon
 which could refer to multiple files, even directories of files.
 Attached files could be copied, copied into the :s, :l, :devs, etc.
 directories of the target devices, or copied and appended to specific
 files (i.e., devs/Mountlist).  Design objective is to allow
 Workbench users to manipulate libraries, etc., giving more control over
 the Workbench environment without cluttering up the desktop with
 thousands of confusing little icons of all the .library, .device,
 and so on files.  (Alternative design would be to make Workbench
 display a default icon for all of the non-iconized files in all
 directories, of course switchable with a menu item.  This would be
 confusing for the non-CLI user, etc . . .)

A possible glitch with my attached-files icon scheme for Workbench
is the following:  someone may create a library shared by several
applications, but a data directory used by only one application.
You'd have to be careful not to have more than one icon have
an overlapping set of attached files; if you did this, then if
the user deleted one of the icons, the attached files for that icon
would go away, but the other icon would still be there, and yet
the application related to that icon would not work.  This is Not Good.
Users would go mad, get angry, arrrgh . . .  Anyway, the solution
is simply to tell designers to only group together support files
to be referenced by a multiple-file icon if they ALWAYS GO TOGETHER.
That is, no one could possibly want to use just SOME of those files,
and not others (i.e., no one would EVER want to create an attached-files
icon that intersected with that icon's attached-files icon, unless
the intersection was set equality.)

				-Mitsu