bart@reed.UUCP (Bart Massey) (01/20/86)
> Swapping Disks: > Option-. aborts a "Please insert disk" message. No > guarantees that the underlying software will understand > this. Thank goodness!!!! The underlying software couldn't have any more trouble with this than it does now!! But I sure wish Apple had followed their own user interface guidelines and made this a button instead of <Option><.> . I'd like to believe there's some systems reason why they can't put up a control while they're asking for a disk swap, but suspect instead that they just don't want uninformed users to do something which might confuse their software. Sometimes I wonder if the "Option" key wasn't the biggest mistake in the whole Mac keyboard design -- it's used for so many different unobvious things. For instance, <flower><.> might have been more reasonable as an abort key sequence, if it had to be a key sequence, since this is analogous to some other Mac and Lisa things. I guess they figured that they finally could do this right (it should have been this way all along) though... At any rate, enough grumping. Just thank goodness the new ROMs have this at all -- it'll sure make MY life easier... Bart Massey ..tektronix!reed!bart
lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) (01/23/86)
In article <2344@reed.UUCP> bart@reed.UUCP (Bart Massey) writes: >> Swapping Disks: >> Option-. aborts a "Please insert disk" message. No >> guarantees that the underlying software will understand >> this. > > Thank goodness!!!! The underlying software couldn't >have any more trouble with this than it does now!! > > But I sure wish Apple had followed their own user >interface guidelines and made this a button instead of ><Option><.> . ... > For >instance, <flower><.> might have been more reasonable as an >abort key sequence, if it had to be a key sequence, since >this is analogous to some other Mac and Lisa things. This is in fact done with Command-. (not Option-.) as is the user interface standard for aborting an operation. The original message transcribed this incorrectly from the Technical Note. If you cancel a disk switch dialog, the file system call that initiated the disk switch will get a "No Such Volume" error (-35). One reason for not using an explicit button is simply because it is possible to get into serious trouble with this feature, so you would not want to do this accidentally. For example, if the system is trying to load a code segment and you cancel the disk switch, there is nothing the system can do but put up a system bomb. In general, you should use this feature only when the requested disk does not exist anymore (when the only other alternative is to reset anyways). Sometimes the program might be able to recover. -- Larry Rosenstein Apple Computer UUCP: {voder, nsc, ios, mtxinu, dual}!apple!lsr CSNET: lsr@Apple.CSNET