kim@analog.UUCP (Kim Helliwell ) (01/15/85)
This Saturday past, at the Apple 32 User's meeting, I saw a demo of a new program for the Mac which should be of interest to all. The demo was conducted by Andy Hertzfeld, who is writing the program for Apple. It is a "pseudo" desk accessory (pseudo, because it is not a DA, but it is accessed thru a selection under the Apple menu . . .), which allows the user to set up, say, a work session involving up to four Mac applications. Once the applications are loaded, "Switcher" allows you to *INSTANTANEOUSLY* switch between those applications. The instantaneous switching is real--the time it takes to scroll the screen of one application off horizontally while scrolling the next application's screen on! Or, if you prefer, the scrolling animation can be suppressed, and the change accomplished with a flicker of the screen. What the program does is partition a 512K Mac's memory with a partition for each application, and on a keystroke command does a "context switch" to the application heap of the appropriate application. Partition size is user settable, with both preferred and minimum partition sizes. For some uses, this is a much better use of the "extra" memory in a 512K mac than a RamDisk, since only one copy of any application is in memory at a time. About the only drawback I see is you apparently aren't allowed to have multiple copies of a single application to switch between--say MacWrite open on two different files, unless the two MacWrite's come from different disks. I guess that's a minor problem, however. Hertzfeld plans to deliver the completed first release to Apple about the first week in Feb. He says it will be distributed to dealers probably early March. It will be FREE to Mac owners, but will not be considered "Public Domain". Presumably, the larger Mac user's groups will get copies and will be allowed to distribute them, however.