Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!iscuva!jimc
From: jimc@iscuva.ISCS.COM (Jim Cathey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Finder Improvements
Keywords: finder, undo
Message-ID: <2162@iscuva.ISCS.COM>
Date: 15 Nov 88 16:41:47 GMT
References: <10895@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <10897@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: ISC Systems Corporation, Spokane, WA
Lines: 44

In article <10897@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> changwoo@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Chang P. Woo) writes:
>>After reading people's gripes and new ideas about improving the
>>Macintosh finder interface.  I would like to have some input as well.

>2. Menu bar in application window. The latest McSink's interface and MS
>Window's interface (heaven forbids!) represent what I mean by.

I disagree (somewhat) with this one.  One of the big advantages of the top-of-
screen menu bar is that you can be quite sloppy with the mouse and still get
to the menus easily.  For me, a quick flip of the wrist puts the mouse in the
proper neighborhood of the menu I want, without overshooting off the top.  A
fine adjustment from there is very easy.  I would resent having to carefully
position the mouse vertically to get to every single menu I wanted.  The 
natural width of the menus pretty much takes care of imprecise horizontal
positioning, but the mouse clipping is all that saves you vertically.

To summarize, I like where the menus are now, and I believe that the existing
menu bar should be kept, with the menu set corresponding to the window with
current focus.  Removing this will negatively affect the, umm, _expert_ user.

This is not to say that there can't be some _additional_ way of doing what
the original poster wanted.  But, how does whatever it is affect the notion
of frontmost window is the active (focused) window?  How would you feed 
commands to a partially obscured window given the original proposal?  Bring
it to front you say?  Well, that already works given the current scheme.

If every window had a built-in menu bar the logical next step would be to
change the WM so that it had one of those nasty focus-follows-the-mouse-
pointer schemes (which I detest).  That way you could feed arbitrary menu
commands to arbitrary windows without intervening refocus commands
(SelectWindow).  Of course, then you'd have to be careful not to knock the
mouse pointer out of the window you're typing in or else your input will be
lost.  Echh.  

The current scheme isn't so bad, is it?  Comments, anyone?

+----------------+
! II      CCCCCC !  Jim Cathey
! II  SSSSCC     !  ISC Systems Corp.
! II      CC     !  TAF-C8;  Spokane, WA  99220
! IISSSS  CC     !  UUCP: uunet!iscuva!jimc
! II      CCCCCC !  (509) 927-5757
+----------------+
			"With excitement like this, who is needing enemas?"