Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!vdsvax!barnett From: barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: is news loosing the battle? Message-ID: <4777@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 8 Jul 88 02:37:18 GMT References: <10250002@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM> <17127@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Reply-To: barnett@steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 62 In article <10250002@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM> diamant@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM (John Diamant) writes: >Non-rectangular windows is "gee whiz," but frankly, I don't care about that >at all. Other than having round clocks, I just don't see this as a big deal. Perhaps you should think of objects instead of windows. I can see it useful to have icons change shape and size according to function. The fat trashcan on the Mac is an example. There is an lpqtool from sunspots ( see Chuck Musciano's tooltool) that can be opened to examine the queue. Perhaps the icon's image could change to a LaserWriter with the lid open when the queue was jammed. However, this would be ugly with a rectangular area for an icon. I would like the L-shape of this icon to have an L-shape clipping area on the root menu. In fact, with my constant battle of real estate, I would like a more flexible organization of icons. Icons arranged like a tree, a Rolodex, or a jigsaw might be useful at times. The new garden demo has an icon the shape of a flower! I would like to display a complex system with an assortment of connectors, dials, pipes, ducts, boxes, etc. (DataViews does this). Pipes that change color, texture or size can provide better feedback than simple lines with labels. This seems to be a natural use of NeWS. (This could be done with X, I am sure. But the effort would be much higher - I would guess.) If you look at HyperText systems, or packages like FileVision on the Mac, combining non-rectangular images can be much more useful. I don't think the potential of a NeWS environment has been demonstrated yet. We have been given a taste, but the Real System hasn't been demonstrated yet. I have had a couple of ideas that seem possible with NeWS, and difficult with any other window system. Perhaps some enterprising developer would like to implement these ideas: 1). Our LaserWriters frequently print screendumps. This is a real drag. I would like to take any window and print it. Because of the PostScript model, this should be easy to do, and improve printer thruput and quality. 2). I often work on several projects at once. With all of the interruptions I get, I would like to take the current window environment, and shrink the entire window to a smaller size and free up my screen for a new environment. When I want to switch back to the original environment, I would click on the miniature screen, which would change place with the current screen. This is something like the Picture in a Picture (PIP) feature of the new TV's. 3). Instead of text scrolling off the top of the window, I would like to have a "Star Wars"-like display where the text gets smaller the farther away it is from the immediate area of interest. Looking at a log file, with the older errors shrinking in size, as an example. The text would scroll off when it finally became illegible, with a user-defined lower limit. We have already seen the pie menus for NeWS. This is one example of something more radical in user interfaces. I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg. -- Bruce G. Barnett uunet!steinmetz!barnett