Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!hc!lll-winken!uunet!ginosko!infinet!adelie!atexnet!rose From: rose@atexnet.UUCP (Robert Rose) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Various comments/questions/suggestions Message-ID: <238@quartz.atexnet.UUCP> Date: 12 May 89 20:31:32 GMT Reply-To: rose@quartz.UUCP (Robert Rose) Organization: Kodak Boston Technology Center, Bedford, MA Lines: 146 Here is a list of some comments, suggestions, and problems I've been having. I'm really glad to see you NeXT people (Ali and Avadis especially) reading this newsgroup and responding! Everybody else, too, this is a very informative and relatively flame free forum, let's keep it up!! GENERAL: 1)Click to type vs. mouse position focus (ala Sun). I want a choice! This should be settable! Also, it's very anoying when you hide something, and then NOBODY is the listener. You could use a stack paradigm; App A is listening, then you bring up App B, now App B is listening. Bring up App C, and it listens. Hide App C and App B gets the focus. Quit out of App B and App A gets the focus again. This too could be settable by the user. In the preferences panel, a new 'focus' pallette would be needed for these two settings. 2)User settable keybindings. I want to be able to make everything answer to emacs commands (as best as possible). I'll do the work if applications let the keys be rebound. Even X let's you do that! 3) CONSISTANCY!! This is VERY important! You've done a good job mostly, (command x,c,v are the same everywhere), but Define is c-d usually, in Edit c-d is something else (Find Previous), in somethings you have to use the menu because define is not keyboard shortcutted (Edit), etc. The Mac really stressed the ease of use; once you know ONE application, the rest are easy because all the keybindings and menu layouts are the same (as much as possible). PLEASE try to do this, it really helps! FONTS: Any word yet on getting some more fonts? I assume Adobe is working on it (we use Optima a lot here in Kodak!) LPR: 1) lpr cuts off text on the right. When you bring it into Edit and Print it comes out OK. PRINTING (from applications): Many 'beta' applications fry PS when you try to print (FrameMake, sometimes WriteNow). Laurie Sefton gave me a good hack, when the PS gets bugged log out and log into the 'exit' account (no passwd); it will reset PS and log you out. Log back into your account and things get better. There should be some code to prevent bad applications from ruining PS for everything else! LOGINS: If you're trying to use yellow pages logins (ie, the +:0::0.... stuff at the end of /etc/passwd) and your home path is somewhere else (like on a Sun) and there is no .NeXT directory in your home path, you can't log in. I assume it's looking for your dock info, etc. How about a message, so you know what's going on? "Sorry no dock info" or something. Also, the /etc/fstab file says it is not read if you're using netinfo. that's not true!! I have some entries that mount my old sun's disks in /etc/fstab, and whenever I reboot, it reads those and mounts my disks! MAIL: (I realize it's still young, here's some improvement suggestions) 1) No options for inserting file, and/or saving a letter as a file. I do this a lot! 2) No 'grouping' commands. It's very nice to be able to 'mark' messages, then forward them all to someone, delete them all, etc. See the Andrew Message system. 3) The 'reply to' field isn't quite right. The problem has to do with domains, I believe. When I send a message out, it looks like you can reply to me with 'rose@onyx' (onyx is the CUBE) or 'rose@quartz' (my Sun) depending on where I sent it from. Nobody in netland knows about quartz or onyx, sice their local names. I don't know how mail would know, but people have told me they couldn't 'reply'. Maybe I could tell mail to put a specified string in the 'reply to' area and I can give it my uucp address (...ll-xn!atexnet!rose)? BROWSER: 1) When you 'Open Directory' the view should be the same as the current open window. It defaults to an icon view. INTERFACE BUILDER: Here's a real can of worms! I love the concepts, and think there is a lot of good work in it already, but the user interface, and method of operation needs some more work. It's waaaaaaaay too confusing and cluttered. By the time you open up all the windows and palletes, it looks like you're running six applications! It's also not at all intuitive how you hook things up and examine conections. I took the developers course and that helps a lot, but the docs we have are all for the .8 IB, and .9 is significantly changed. How about shipping the .9 IB docs with the system, or at least posting ascii versions here? The up to date docs should help a lot. One suggestion is with the sounds/icons palettes. Why not combine them into a 'resources' palette and choose between sounds, icons, and whetever else. Alternatively, maybe they could go in the 'Pallettes' menu (add two more choices at the top: sound and icons). Also, with these 'resources', there is a two way switch for system and local. This is nice, but you really need three switches; system, local (to the user), and program only. The local is just that program you're building. There should be a user local so something you want to put in all your applications (like your picture!) will be in one convienient place. Another problem with sounds is their size. When I import a sound there should be a way to make a link instead of a copy. I know there is a chance the original will go away, but the programmer can make the choice and deal with the consequences!! Another thing you need is 'Close Application' for when you're done working on something to get it and its' menus out of the way. I haven't used it enough to more suggestions, anyone else? OTHER: 1)Has anyone heard of (and know where I can get) some software to 'read' a text file? i.e. convert ascii to voice. DEC has a product that does a reasonable job, called DecTalk, you hook it up like a terminal (RS232 port) and send it text. It talks it out a speaker. The NeXT machine would be an ideal platform to do this on!! 2) When you bring up an application, sometimes it's menu in the upper left just sits on top of the menu for the previous application! It's hard to reproduce, but it definetely happens sometimes! 3) Minor bug in more: when it's at the page and asks for '--More-- (n%)', the --More-- string stays on the screen. It should go away. 4) G++ and/or C++. There's been discussions about this in gnu.g++, comp.lang.c++, and here in comp.sys.next. I know all the IB stuff and most else has the objective-c wrapper around it, but some of us have lots of code written in c++. I think people at NeXT should take the responsibility of either getting g++ to compile on the cube (and then including it in 1.0), or at least verifying that at&t cfront compiles and runs on it. MANY people have asked me about this here (since we do lots of c++). 5) What happened to Lisp? I though we were supposed to get a terminal based version with .9? I can't find it.