info-mac@uw-beaver (01/07/85)
From: Greensid%PPL@LLL-MFE.ARPA As more and inexpensive memory becomes available for the Mac, and as extremely large storage devices become available in the near future,the Finder will become rather awkward and inefficient to use. E.g., with 512K memory available, it seems silly to have two copies of an application in memory at once (in RAM disk and wherever it is as it executes). The <info-mac> community should start discussing what THEY think (as opposed to what Apple thinks) would make a comfortable interface. For example, I would like to see the desktop become a menu item that can be pulled down at anytime to show what applications are running. The mouse could then be used to stop or to start up applications. A stopped application would simply reside in memory unless a new application needs its space, at which time a window could be opened to alert the user and to allow some choices. Multitasking is of course assumed. Further enhancements that I would like to see would be a UNIX like menu that contains the 5 or 10 most commonly used UNIX system commands, such as grep, cat, input and output direction, cd, ar, awk, cmp, sed, sort, tr, and wc. With slow disks and many files, these commands (e.g., cat or grep) are almost impossible to implement with current editors and applications. Another improvement would be to modify the MAC to have an eraseable ROM (say 256K bytes or more) which could be loaded with convenient applications from disk. Anyone who has experienced the joys of running the mac with a RAMdisk knows how painful it is to go back to slow magnetic media. Still other improvements would be startup files (being to create an application of applications, e.g. creating a ramdisk, loading it with certain files, then start up one of the files in ramdisk), which have already been discussed in <info-mac> but have not yet been implemented. The media keeps reporting hints of a new Finder that will have directories. Does anyone out there know what else it will contain? Is Apple thinking of taking the Finder in the direction of Smalltalk? User feedback should be very useful before the new designs are set in concrete.
info-mac@uw-beaver (01/08/85)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler)
> Is Apple thinking of taking the Finder in the direction of Smalltalk?
I don't know. But I do know that they're taking Smalltalk in
the direction of the Mac. They just hired away one of our best
Macintosh programmers to implement a Mac/Lisa Smalltalk that uses
the ROM for windows and graphics and so on rather than using
actual Smalltalk methods.info-mac@uw-beaver (01/09/85)
From: Michael Rubin <RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA> I would bloody well hope the next Finder has real directories; a hard disk is practically unusable without them. The current Finder seems to have more misfeatures than features. You can't see file sizes or dates when "Viewing by Icon", and you can't move or delete files in any other Viewing mode. You can't extend a selection across folder boundaries, to run a program on files that happen to be in different folders. You can't drop a file into a disk or folder or Trash icon if the icon is opened; you have to move the file into its window instead, even if the window is buried someplace. Sometimes I wonder just what's in the Finder; it occupies 50K of code, and all it does is display directories, move files and run programs. The Bourne Shell on a (68000-based) Unix system is only 28K, and contains a fair-sized programming language.... You're right, most of the finder functions ought to be in a desk accessory. Regardless of what problems in the Finder are fixed, the Mac user interface is still missing some important concepts due to its insistence that you're using an appliance, not a (user-programmable) computer. For example, the idea that programs might want to talk to other programs as well as to humans. "Scripts", "shell programming" and "redirecting input and output" are meaningless because all programs are assumed to be interactive applications, not filters that process some input and produce some output according to some instructions. The only information the Finder can pass to a program is what data file(s) to operate on -- and it's not even an ordered list, so you can't even write a program to append one file to the end of another without dialog boxes. The notion of a file "belonging" to exactly one application is another lossage; many types of files (e.g. program text) are produced by one application to be used by another. The Mac OS also seems to have been designed by somebody who was thinking of a PDP-11-class machine with a fast hard disk. The Segment Loader is a pretty neat attempt to make a virtual-memory machine entirely in software; but virtual memory requires a dedicated swap device, which is why the poor Mac has to keep asking for its system disk back and the poor user has to sit through all those swap delays. Nobody ever accused Apple of being good at writing operating systems; we can only hope that the worst faults aren't too deeply embedded to fix in a later release. Hopefully on January 24.... (Waiting for the 1985 Super Bowl ad) --Mike Rubin <Rubin@Columbia-20.Arpa> -------
info-mac@uw-beaver (01/11/85)
From: Piersol.pasa@XEROX.ARPA I disagree with your desire to push the Finder closer to UNIX. I would like to see some UNIX-like features incorporated, certainly, but I see no reason to add features like grep, etc. Remember that Mac is intended as an 'appliance' computer, not a programmer's machine. Many of the functions you reference are rather esoteric for a non-programmer, and I have doubts whether they have great utility to 'the rest of us'. The point is that they would increase still further the size of the finder, which is already rather large. It is my feeling that they belong in a programmer environment separate from the Finder. Something like a visual UNIX (visible pipes, filters by example, etc) would be fantastic, or, ideally, Smalltalk would be most enjoyable. I am a Smalltalk applications programmer, and so I tend to find UNIX-like environments unnecessarily cryptic. Thus I object to names like grep, cat, sed, etc. I would like to see Apple add similar function in a more natural interface. I feel they did an excellent job of handling the most basic file manipulations in Finder, and would love to see a similarly good job done on the higher-level functions that have been developed over the years. Kurt