info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (11/07/84)
From: Gustavo Fernandez <FERNANDEZ@SU-SCORE.ARPA> Emacs for the Mac: Depends on what you want. If you want Multiple windows, FILE does that. If you want all the advanced programability, you will probably have to wait until 512K macs becom ubiquitus. Software venders will tend to not want to spend so much time on hacker tools like EMACS as on features that are immediately accessable to the first time user. Look for lots of new menus but limited programmability in the future, (at least in the EMACS sense. Maybe something more like Odesta Helix) Scribe: Oh How Horrible! The entire idea behind the Mac is what you see is what you get. There is no reason why more powerful word processors cannot be designed to automatically do things like TOC, Index, etc. Command driven monitor. There are two issues here: 1. Better performance 2. Exec files Better performance is already realized by the MFinder application. Unfortunately this is limited to only launching applications and has no copy/rename/delete functions yet. Most copies also have a bug whioch prevents it from being the startup application. (This has recently been fixed.) TYhe minifinder, however, is about as fast as you will see the Mac run where the floppy disk is the limiting factor. Exec files: This would be nice to have, especially for development environments. Unfortunately, these do not fit well with the Mac user interface. Logging mouse clicks is very tricky and timing dependent. It also offers little in the way of conditionals. Also, can you emagine your mother (for whom the Mac was supposedly designed) writing an exec file? Inside Mac alternate: Apple will eventually come out with a published final release. Until then, any secondary source would just repeat what's already in IM and really couldn't be any smaller. Price just went down too. $100 is not so bad if you are at all serious about programming the Mac. 8" floppy: You might as well ask to interface a card reader to the Mac. Standard 8" SSSD floppies have little more than half the capacity of a Mac floppy. There is precious little software that you can (or that you would want to) port to and from the mac, for a number of reasons: different processor, OS and user interface being but a few. -------