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From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Icons, pipes, etc.
Message-ID: <7405@boring.cwi.nl>
Date: Wed, 3-Jun-87 06:55:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.7405
Posted: Wed Jun  3 06:55:05 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Jun-87 20:48:41 EDT
References: <8705190042.AA14664@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 45

Last week, Steven Pemberton and I did some brainstorming about
icons, user interfaces, pipes, etc. triggered by the recent discussions.

We came up with some ideas:

- There's a difference between doing something to the object (i.e. executing
it) and to the meta-object (i.e. renaming it, write-protecting it).
Our idea was to let clicks in the icon refer to the object, and clicks
in the title bar to the meta-object. This is similar to what the Mac does
(when you've selected an icon and move the mouse to the title string, you
can edit it), but more general. I.e. No more 'show info' menu: double-clicking
on the title bar will bring up the info menu.

- Usually, you don't need to specify where the output of a program goes.
Either the program has no output, the output is the same as the input
(e.g. editors), or the output file name is constructed from the input file name.
So, for most cases, selecting all input files and dragging them to the
application is good enough.

- If you *do* want to specify the output file, or certain flags, options, etc.
you double click the application icon. This will make it grow into a box
which contains buttons, etc. for options, and various icons for the input
file, output file, etc. Now, you can set uptions, drag the output icon
to where you want your output to go, drag your input files to the input icon, etc.

Pipes are simple now. for 'ls -l a b | pr >/dev/lp', you do:
	double-click ls
	double-click pr
	drag pr output icon to printer icon
	drag ls output icon to pr input icon
	select a and b and drag them to ls input icon

- There are two things we didn't really figure out how to do nicely.
First is 'move'. Copy is simple (you grab the file, and feed it to the
destination disk/directory), but move is slightly different. Shift-drag
seems to be a good candidate, but if you want your UI to be orthogonal
this means that shift-dragging a file to an application program would
delete the file. This is bound to make you lose a lot of files.

Second is the difference between starting an application without parameters
at all and 'opening' an application to be able to specify the parameters
in detail. Both of these are candidates for double click on the application.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@cwi.nl (or jack@mcvax.uucp)
	The shell is my oyster.