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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: More Finder Improvements
Message-ID: <76000307@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 88 23:40:00 GMT
References: <507@unocss.UUCP>
Lines: 28
Nf-ID: #R:unocss.UUCP:507:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76000307:000:1235
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Nov 22 17:40:00 1988


1.  I dislike the fact that you must always bring a window to the
    front to use it.  Here's why:

    (a) In many editing programs (like Macdraw, MS-Word), it's
        efficient to make a "palette" of frequently typed things
        in a second window, then just cut & paste these things into
        your document.  But for maximum exposure, you'd like to hide
	the herald of the palette under your main window.  This herald
	keeps coming up, and you keep having to put it down.

    (b) In other cases, a certain layering maximizes visible screen
	real-estate by hiding unnecessary junk on the bottom.  But if 
	windows are frequently coming to the top, this stacking is
	painful to maintain.

	I.e. sometimes you want to be able to access a certain part of a
	window, but don't need the rest.  By covering up the rest,
	the screen real-estate can recycled for other things.

  	I'm very surprised the original designers didn't anticipate
	this method of squeezing everything out of the screen 
	real-estate, since the first Mac had a very small screen.


Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies