Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!tank!gsbrob1@apcvxa.uchicago.edu
From: gsbrob1@apcvxa.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Finder Improvements
Message-ID: <821@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 17 Nov 88 17:34:26 GMT
Sender: news@tank.uchicago.edu
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Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
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In article <8811170216.AA22099@yorkville.csri.toronto.edu>, vg@csri.toronto.edu
(Victor Greenberg) writes...
[discussion]
>My biggest beef with the current scheme is that it is more modal than
>necessary, with its concept of a single active window.
>1) I dislike the fact that if you lay out a collection of non-overlapping
>   windows on the screen, you still have to click once to "bring a window
>   to the front" before you can do anything else within it.  A better idea
>   is to allow all non-obscured windows to respond mouse clicks instantly,
>   without the need for a preliminary activation clicks.  Partially obscured
>   windows would still have to be brought to the front before they could
>   be used.

I think this would be a bit tricky to do while still maintaining an intuitive
user interface.  In the Mac world things should be consistent: having a window
respond either immediately or only after a second mouse click to mouse input,
depending on whether some portion of the window was obscured, would tend to
make the interface more, rather than less, complicated (at least for a great
number of "average" users, I think).
                                    
> 
>While I'm beefing about modality, I'd like to complain about modal dialog
>boxes as well.  The Mac user interface has far too many of them.  For
>example, there is absolutely no reason for the "Open..." dialog in the
>File menu to be preemptive.  Wouldn't it be nice if the file select dialog
>came up in a non-preemptive window, so you could leave it in a corner
>of the screen while you did something else?
>  I claim that most modal dialogs should either not preempt anything at all,
>or should only preempt a single window, leaving everything else functioning
>normally.  For example, the "Close without saving changes?" dialog that
>comes up when you attempt to close an unsaved document only needs to preempt
>the document window it refers to, not the entire system.
> 

This is a very good point.  While I think that most modal dialog boxes do need
to preempt the application to which they're related (or else they wouldn't be
modal in the first place, right? :->), in the MultiFinder world it's fairly
anachronistic to have them stop the whole show.  At least for commonly used
dialog boxes like SFGetFile and SFPutFile, as well as the "save your doc?" box,
it would be good if they only stopped the application to which they were
related.

Robert 
gsbrob1@apcvxa.uchicago.edu
ra_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu

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  . generic disclaimer:  all opinions here expressed are mine and mine alone .
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