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From: peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Something else you can't do on the Mac
Message-ID: <10785@claris.com>
Date: 5 Jan 90 01:57:28 GMT
References: <21628@mimsy.umd.edu> <3470@hub.UUCP> <10287@zodiac.ADS.COM>
Reply-To: peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Claris Corporation, Santa Clara CA
Lines: 45

In article <10287@zodiac.ADS.COM> jtn@zodiac.ADS.COM (John Nelson) writes:
>
>A "more" or "page" DA is clearly the way to go, however to make it
>even SIMPLER the finder could do the following:
>
>You have a pure text file and you want to open it so you double click
>on it.  Ooops, there's obviously no application for something called
>"document" so the finder automatically pops up a menu of popular
>applications for the user to select from and then opens up the
>document with the selected application.  Or the finder could be
>programmed to open "documents" with a default application like
>Teachtext.
>
>It really isn't helpful to the user to display alerts that say things
>like "oh... I can't open that."  A beteter philosophy is to have the
>computer propose solutions(i.e. "what would you like me to open this
>unknown document with?").

Well, I disagree (obviously).  If I'm trying to open a MacDraw II file and
don't have MacDraw II around, having TeachText open it up "by default" is
a horrible solution.  All I'll see is garbage.  Same with an Excel document,
etc.  This would REALLY confuse nonHacker users. 

Fact is, my machine at home (where I don't do programming) doesn't have a
single TEXT file in all it's 40 meg of files!  Neither does my Mom or Dad's
machines.  TEXT files just aren't that common on Mac unless the user is a
programmer or comm hacker - and these people are a small minority of Mac
users.

Again I think we're just seeing the difference here in expectations.  TEXT
files are not really the Mac way to do things and lots of support for them
would work against the basic metaphor of the machine - Applications and
Documents go together and you (mostly) need the original program to read
a document file in (unless of course there is a conversion facility build
into the program).

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