Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!bti!mfm
From: mfm@bti.UUCP (Merle F. McClelland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Finder Improvements
Keywords: finder, undo
Message-ID: <209@bti.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 88 06:59:07 GMT
References: <10895@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <10897@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <2162@iscuva.ISCS.COM>
Reply-To: mfm@bti.UUCP (Merle F. McClelland)
Distribution: na
Organization: Biomagnetic Technologies, inc., San Diego, CA
Lines: 83

In article <2162@iscuva.ISCS.COM> jimc@iscuva.ISCS.COM (Jim Cathey) writes:
>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.
>
>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
>mouse pointer out of the window you're typing in or else your input will be

Here here.  I have a 19" display, and I use exactly the same technique of 
"flinging" the mouse to the top and then moving to the desired menu.  Having the
mouse stop at the top is an important feature, as well as always knowing where
the menus are.

I especially detest window environments that "grab" the pointer
and don't restore it's position when finished.  SunView does this with pop-up
menus.  If I pop-up a menu at the bottom of a window, and select an item near
the bottom of the menu (one that extends below the bottom of the window), when
I let go of the mouse button, the cursor remains outside of the window, not
where I originally poped the menu up.  Grrr.  At this point I usually forget
to move the pointer back inside the window, and of course my input is lost.
SunView does permit setting a click-to-select mode, but it's not the default.

Another suggestion for Finder/Multifinder improvements would be the ability to
send a window to the back of the stack.  With the Apple menu application items
you can bring windows to the front (as well as simply clicking on them if they
are visible), but if, for example, I have a large drawing window in the
foreground, and I want to temporarily bring all other application windows to
the front, I have to individually select each window.  This isn't a major flaw,
but I would be nice to have a complete set of window management facilities.

I tend to arrange my finder windows in a tree structure, with sub folders
"indented" downward and to the right, with the title bar of the child window
aligned with the bottom of the parent's title bar, and to the right an equal
amount.  I would like to see a user-selectable layout feature that would force
new finder windows to conform to a user's favorite scheme.  Windows would not be
constrained to this position after creation, but a finder "clean-up" option
would force open windows back into the user-selected scheme. The current "Layout"
utility (Public Domain) allows you select many finder attributes, and there is
a window position option, but it is an absolute position, not relative to the
parent window. Also, how about a Clean Up option that does an alphabetical
clean up on icon windows.

I believe that one of the most important features of the Mac interface is having
both applications and data files, active and inactive, represented by icons.
In SunView and the common XWindows environments, icons represent ONLY active
processes that have been "iconified".  Command execution is usually handled
by custom pop-up menus or a terminal emulator command-line interface.  Data file
access is by typing file names.  I really take advantage of the Mac's ability to
have long file names, and I wouldn't like to have to type them! You can perform 
many file-manipulation operations (copying, moving between folders, selecting
files, getting various directory listing formats, etc.) without ever touching
the keyboard.  In SunView/XWindows, I find that I am moving back and forth
between the mouse and keyboard much more often.

Finally, with Multifinder I have found that a visual equivalent to UNIX pipes
would be useful for performing multiple operations on files.  Perhaps a 
"connect-the-icons" drawing mode in the finder would permit selection of a
sequence of files to execute.  The one mac feature that would hinder this is
the inability to select items from more than one folder at a time.  I don't like
cluttering my desktop with files from all over the file system in order to
to perform a common operation on all of them, so the ability to select items
from more than one folder would be ideal. Actually, the above description sounds
more like a visual scripting scheme, which suggests another missing feature,
one that Switcher had.  That is, the ability to create "Sets" of applications
that could be represented by an icon, and executed as a group when opened.  I
find that I have several groups of programs that i typically use, and this would
simplify things for me.

Well, I'm sure I can think of more things, but I have yet to find a  better
environment than the Mac for the way I like to work.  That includes command-line
interfaces (CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX) or windowing environments (SunView, XWIndows, 
NeWS, or Microsoft Windows). No environment is perfect, but the Mac comes 
closest to matching how I visualize the structure of data in a file system,
and I won't give it up until something MUCH better comes along. I want to thank
Apple for coming up with a very good design that has been incrementally improved
over the last five years, and one I expect will continue to improve. 
-- 
| "Everything you |     All opinions expressed are mine, all mine!    |
|      know       |     So, don't go blaming BTi for my incoherent    |
|    is wrong!"   |                  ramblings...                     |
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