arp@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU (John Gordos) (12/08/88)
Folks, I've got something that I'd REALLY like to see added to the WorkBench; Being able to "click" on an icon AND while it opens, "click" on another icon AND... well, you get the idea. It would be nice to click on a drawer, have the window open, see the next drawer you want (but not all the icons in the first have appeared yet) and click on "drawer number 2" and have it start to open. That sort of thing. Another buy would be to be able to click on the close gadget of a window and have it close BEFORE it displays all the icons in the window. I'm sure that the problem probably lies in layers and that it'd be non-trivial to implement, but it'd really get the point of multi-tasking across. My wife doesn't understand multitasking really; All she knows is that the WorkBench is enough like a MAC that she can use it. If the WorkBench seemed to multitask more than it does, it would surely help us both; I can scoot around with that mouse much quicker than my floppies can display a drawer! And, IMHO, the shell's use of run and aliases is busted; If you are running a shell and use run to "spawn" a new process, it should spawn a shell, and not a cli. It's important to present a consistent interface to an end user. I *know* why an alias isn't expanded in a run command, but I also think that there isn't much point in aliasing something if it won't be used 100% consistently. Needing to remember that aliasing works in all cases EXCEPT with run is not consistent. Waiting for flames, John -- ============================================================================= John A. Gordos, III oucs!crta!gordos SAMI/Burke Distributed Systems Technical Support Cincinnati, Ohio "Go Bengals!!"
me128-aw@kepler.Berkeley.EDU (me128 student) (12/09/88)
In article <720@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU> arp@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU (John Gordos) writes: > > Folks, > > I've got something that I'd REALLY like to see added to > the WorkBench; Being able to "click" on an icon AND > while it opens, "click" on another icon AND... well, you > get the idea. While we're on the subject, I have some wishes of my own. A few of you might have seen a program I wrote called "WORPBench" standing for WOrkbench Replacement Project. I've shown it around here and there and briefly at one BAADGE meeting. It basically duplicates the functions of workbench. It's 80% done, and I havn't worked on it since classes started, but might now that the semester is ending. I would like, however, for some of my ideas to go into 1.4 anyway. If they do, and 1.4 comes out soon (yeah, right), then I don't have to waste all that time coding. Most of these features are already in my worpbench, but I've still got quite a few arthopods in my code, and some features, such as "Info" still aren't in. YE OLE AMIGA WYSHLISTE: 1. Non-squished icons in interlace mode. Nothing looks stupider to me than the flat icons in an interlaced workbench. How about a preferences setting for horizontally squishing an icons to make their aspect ratios correct? In worpbench, I use a color-priority squishing which seems to work well for almost all icons. The color priority is there so you don't have missing lines. For instance, drawer icons won't lose the left or right border (without both) so its aspect ratio stays correct. Since Amiga icons tend to be too big and gaudy to begin with, I've found that this works just great except for disk icons. Instead, they should be doubled vertically (halving makes them too small). Since they are movable, this is ok. 2. No disk icon positions. I HATE IT when people snapshot disk icons so they come up right under my cli window. There should be a preferences setting so workbench will ignore the icon position and always align the disks itself (perhaps with a choice of along right side, left side, top? ) 3. Type text, Show IFF picture, print file, print picture from menu? 4. User definable menu. This menu would be loaded from a file, and would execute programs as either CLI or workbench tasks when the menu was selected. 5. User definable text and colors The icon fonts and text color should be user selectable, as should be the window title text and colors. This may seem trivial, but I think a clean, professional-looking workbench screen is important to selling amigas. I think the dark text on light title bars of the Mac are much better looking. 6. Backdrop patterns. Again, whimsical, but I like to customize. Backdrop pictures might be an option too, but I'd hate to give up all the chip ram. 7. Pulling icons out of windows onto the WB screen How about fixing this so it works right. Perhaps allowing them to be snapshotted this way? This would eliminate the window clutter I too often have. Also, fix the bug which loses the icons from time to time. What causes this? I remember the discussion about 2 years ago but never heard an answer. You remember, drag and icon out of a window, do stuff, DO NOT snapshot, yet reboot and the icon will be gone when you re-open the window. 8. Remapping icon colors Worpbench has an option where it will remap icons so they look ok on your colors even if they are switched from the standard. See, I like black text on white screen. Less flicker too. 9. Stuff I believe already exists in 1.4 - show as text, name, date, size - extended select ala mac 10. Option to run as cli When you're in showastext mode, how about running the task as a cli process if it does not have an associated icon file. (double click..a cli window opens...it runs). CLI should really rarely be necessary .... Anyway, these are just a few thoughts. PLEEZE! save me from having to write and debug all this code! Put it in 1.4! -Vincent H. Lee D
iphwk%MTSUNIX1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Bill Kinnersley) (12/09/88)
[In "Re: WorkBench Dreams", me128 student said:] : : A few of you might have seen a program I wrote called "WORPBench" standing : for WOrkbench Replacement Project. I've shown it around here and there : and briefly at one BAADGE meeting. It basically duplicates the functions : of workbench. It's 80% done, and I havn't worked on it since classes started, : but might now that the semester is ending. : : -Vincent H. Lee : There's a program I wrote called "Hackbench" which does this too. You can find the source for it on Fish Disk 96. -- --Bill Kinnersley Physics Department Montana State University Bozeman, MT 59717 INTERNET: iphwk@terra.oscs.montana.edu BITNET: IPHWK@MTSUNIX1
daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) (12/10/88)
In article <720@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU> arp@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU (John Gordos) writes: > > Folks, > > I've got something that I'd REALLY like to see added to > the WorkBench; Being able to "click" on an icon AND > while it opens, "click" on another icon AND... well, you > get the idea. > > It would be nice to click on a drawer, have the window open, > see the next drawer you want (but not all the icons in the > first have appeared yet) and click on "drawer number 2" and > have it start to open. That sort of thing. Another buy > would be to be able to click on the close gadget of a window > and have it close BEFORE it displays all the icons in the > window. > > I'm sure that the problem probably lies in layers and that > it'd be non-trivial to implement, but it'd really get the > point of multi-tasking across. My wife doesn't understand > multitasking really; All she knows is that the WorkBench > is enough like a MAC that she can use it. If the WorkBench > seemed to multitask more than it does, it would surely help > us both; I can scoot around with that mouse much quicker than > my floppies can display a drawer! > While not getting into specifics, I can say that the subject of WB multi-tasking or apparently multi-tasking has been brought to our attention and will be addressed in the V1.4 Workbench. Fortunately, at lot of us here use the Workbench so that adds an extra incentive to fix/add things. :^) Regards, David Berezowski
daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) (12/10/88)
In article <27075@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> me128-aw@kepler.Berkeley.EDU (me128 student) writes: >In article <720@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU> arp@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU (John Gordos) writes: >> >> Folks, >> >> I've got something that I'd REALLY like to see added to >> the WorkBench; Being able to "click" on an icon AND >> while it opens, "click" on another icon AND... well, you >> get the idea. > >While we're on the subject, I have some wishes of my own. > >YE OLE AMIGA WYSHLISTE: > >1. Non-squished icons in interlace mode. >2. No disk icon positions. >3. Type text, Show IFF picture, print file, print picture from menu? >4. User definable menu. >5. User definable text and colors >6. Backdrop patterns. >7. Pulling icons out of windows onto the WB screen >8. Remapping icon colors >9. Stuff I believe already exists in 1.4 > - show as text, name, date, size > - extended select ala mac >10. Option to run as cli >Anyway, these are just a few thoughts. PLEEZE! save me from having to >write and debug all this code! Put it in 1.4! > Yah right! So now I have to write and debug all this code! Thanks alot! :^) But seriously, I don't think you'll be too disappointed; nudge, nudge, wink, wink, grin, grin, say no more. A nods as good as a wink to a blind bat. Whoops, I've slipped into my Monty Python mode again. david
andy@cbmvax.UUCP (Andy Finkel) (12/10/88)
In article <720@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU> arp@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU (John Gordos) writes: > And, IMHO, the shell's use of run and aliases is busted; If > you are running a shell and use run to "spawn" a new process, > it should spawn a shell, and not a cli. It's important to > present a consistent interface to an end user. I *know* why When you use run to spawn a new process from the shell, the new process you get *is* a shell. However, aliases (at the moment) are not inherited by child shells. -- andy finkel {uunet|rutgers|amiga}!cbmvax!andy Commodore-Amiga, Inc. "Possibly this is a new usage of the word 'compatible' with which I was previously unfamiliar" Any expressed opinions are mine; but feel free to share. I disclaim all responsibilities, all shapes, all sizes, all colors.
pds@quintus.uucp (Peter Schachte) (12/10/88)
In article <27075@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> me128-aw@kepler.Berkeley.EDU (me128 student) writes: [Lots of good ideas for a better workbench] Most of these ideas seem really good. I've got a few more wishes. The substantive ones are at the bottom. For starters, I agree with arp@pdp.cs.OHIOU.EDU (John Gordos) about asyncronous activity. When an icon or gadget is visible, I should be able to click on it. This was mentioned a while ago with a plea to get rid of the Zzz cursor. >2. No disk icon positions. It would be nice to be able to snapshot window *sizes* without snapshotting the position. Maybe this should be done with an option that ignores the position but not the size. >3. Type text, Show IFF picture, print file, print picture from menu? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you proposing these as standard menu items. I think these would be better placed in a user-definable menu. You could provide a default file (say, s:user-menu) that provides these. >4. User definable menu. Great, but why not allow several menus? It'd make it easier to organize the items. Also, there should be a way to change the menus (by editing the file) without rebooting. Also, a minor but useful point, if you have a drawer window open selected when you select a menu item that gets launched CLI-style, that directory should be the current one for that launch. So, e.g., you could work in a drawer window, and then select the MAKE menu item, and it would know what directory to look in for a Makefile. >7. Pulling icons out of windows onto the WB screen >Perhaps allowing them to be snapshotted this way? Amen! >10. Option to run as cli >When you're in showastext mode, how about running the task as a cli process >if it does not have an associated icon file. Or if it has a TOOLTYPE of MODE=CLI or something like that. A few more things: 11. Items in user-defined menus should be able to run as WB or CLI processes. I really miss this in BROWSER. 12. Allow drag launching. I.e., I should be able to drop a file icon onto a program icon, and that would be the same as selecting the file icon and shift-double-clicking on program icon. Old idea. 13. More convenient arg passing. Currently all you can pass to a WB-started process is files. I want to pass switches, strings, etc. Ok, I can pass these as TOOLTYPEs, and that's good. But why not have a standard TOOLTYPE like ARGS=<argument pattern> where <argument pattern is sort of like CLI command templates. More generality would be nice, but the basic idea is good. Then in addition to the menu item OPEN, there would be an item OPEN WITH ARGS that would parse the TOOLTYPES, find the ARGS entry, find the entries and values named in the argument pattern, and put up a requester window with toggle buttons for boolean switches, string gadgets for string switches, radio buttons for multiple-choice switches, etc. You get the idea. Then there'd be SAVE, QUIT, and RUN buttons. Hitting SAVE would install the configuration back into the icon. RUN would close down the requester, and start up the program with the specified args (I have no idea how to do this for WB-type programs, but it would be easy if started CLI-style). Fixing up WB-startup to include switches is something Peter Da Silva proposed recently. This would be a Good Thing, and is really just a matter of convention. 14. On-demand scrolling windows for program output. Instead of opening a window for program I/O, hand it a stream to a special device that waits until it gets output from the program before it opens a window. And when it does get some bits, it stores them away somewhere, and opens a scrolling window on the output. Something like a VIEW window, if you've seen VIEW. This window would be special, though, in that you could select it like an icon, and supply it as input to another program. This would let you do pipelines a step at a time from the workbench. When the window is closed, the stored bits are deleted, and the stream, if it's still opened, becomes a like a NULL: device. You could also write the contents of the window to a file. Again, I don't know how to do this for a WB-style launch, but for CLI-style, it's easy. And again, I believe Peter Da Silva has a proposal for WB that would allow this (right, Peter?). I think all this together would be enough to lure a few more programmer types away from a keyboard-based environment to a WIMP interface. -Peter Schachte pds@quintus.uucp ..!sun!quintus!pds
pds@quintus.uucp (Peter Schachte) (12/10/88)
In article <835@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
[Lots of good ideas for a better workbench]
I forgot the most important thing for improving WB: keep the drawer
windows up-to-date! When a file is created (deleted), the window should
change to include (remove) it. It's easy to do: every few seconds,
check the timestamp on the directory. If it has changed, rescan the
directory. I'm told this won't cause disk thrashing, though I'm a bit
skeptical (what if you're doing something that uses all your cache
buffers?).
It's an embarrassment every time I have to explain to someone why the
file they just created with a word processor doesn't show up in the
window. "Oh, you have to close the window and open it back up." Yuck!
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
..!sun!quintus!pdsvkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) (12/11/88)
(I hit the f key to avoid editing a long article and now I don't know who I am quoting) Please, please no more `+'/`-' switches. Put the ARP GADS or something similar in some .library, and make everybody use it. I HATE SIWTCHES that have a single letter mnemonics. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- More sophisticated the technology, Nath more vulnarable it is to crude sabotage. vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu -The Doctor, in the Pirate Planet.
odin@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (60200000) (12/11/88)
In article <835@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes: > > [lots of good ideas deleted] > >12. Allow drag launching. I.e., I should be able to drop a file icon >onto a program icon, and that would be the same as selecting the file >icon and shift-double-clicking on program icon. Old idea. > > [even more good ideas deleted] > >-Peter Schachte >pds@quintus.uucp >..!sun!quintus!pds The Finder on the Macintosh has an even easier way to launch programs, just double-click on the file icon and the computer searches available devices for the appropriate program and then automatically runs the program and loads the file. It would be nice to have the built in flexibility of both options. Jon :<=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=>: :Jon Granrose | // Only | ARPAnet: odin@ucscb.UCSC.EDU : :Cowell College, UCSC | \X/ Amiga | Bitnet: ~!ucbvax!ucscc!ucscb!odin : :Santa Cruz, CA 95064 | Opinions?!? That'll be the day... : +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
perley@trub.steinmetz (Donald P Perley) (12/12/88)
In article <5714@saturn.ucsc.edu> odin@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Jon Granrose) writes: >In article <835@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes: >>12. Allow drag launching. I.e., I should be able to drop a file icon >>onto a program icon, and that would be the same as selecting the file >>icon and shift-double-clicking on program icon. Old idea. > >The Finder on the Macintosh has an even easier way to launch programs, just >double-click on the file icon and the computer searches available devices >for the appropriate program and then automatically runs the program and >loads the file. It would be nice to have the built in flexibility of both >options. That is not what the first guy was asking for. What is the appropriate program? If the file is say, a C source file, does the finder print, edit, or compile it depending on which "appropriate program" it finds first? What you are suggesting is already standard, essentially. If you already know what program is appropriate, you can store that on the icon, and it gets run automatically when you double-click. -don perley
pds@quintus.uucp (Peter Schachte) (12/13/88)
In article <1137@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu> vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu.UUCP (Vidhyanath K. Rao) writes: >Please, please no more `+'/`-' switches. >I HATE SIWTCHES that have a single letter mnemonics. One of the things that should be made easier is taking a vanilla unix C program and making it run on the Amiga, including under the workbench. It's not too much to ask someone to create an icon, but it IS a bit too much to ask them to edit the program's main() and fix up the argument conventions and startup code. And many if not most of these C program use single letter switches. See my earlier posting on suggestions for an improved workbench for a way to make this much more palatable to workbench users. -Peter Schachte pds@quintus.uucp ..!sun!quintus!pds
peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (12/14/88)
In article <849@quintus.UUCP>, pds@quintus.uucp (Peter Schachte) writes: > One of the things that should be made easier is taking a vanilla unix C > program and making it run on the Amiga, including under the workbench. I wrote a little program called "instant application" that was intended to do this. It came with an instant-applicationized version of a UNIX-y "PR" program. It seems to have sunk without a trace (though it seems a few people are using my file requestor, which is just a variant of instant). It's easy enough to hook this into 'main', particularly if most of your main is like this: switch(**argc) { case 'a': optiona(); ... } -- Peter da Silva `-_-' peter@sugar.uu.net Have you hugged U your wolf today? Disclaimer: My typos are my own damn busines#!rne
ba@m-net.UUCP (Bill Allen) (12/19/88)
Sender: Reply-To: ba@m-net.UUCP (Bill Allen) Followup-To: Distribution: Organization: M-NET, Ann Arbor, MI Keywords: I wish.. With the current commercial and PD programs that modify Workbench, (colored backgrounds, added menu choices, Mac- like expanding windows, etc) has anyone seen a program that allows generic icons to appear for files that don't have companion.info files? I have a hard disk with 1000's of programs that don't have icons. Not looking forward to doubling the number of files just so I can use Workbench to load them. -- --------------------------------------------------------- Reply-To: ba@m-net.UUCP (Bill Allen Beogelein) Organization: M-NET, Ann Arbor, MI ---------------------------------------------------------
karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (12/21/88)
In article <2637@m2-net.UUCP>, ba@m-net.UUCP (Bill Allen) writes: > has anyone seen a program that > allows generic icons to appear for files that don't have > companion.info files? I have a hard disk with 1000's of > programs that don't have icons. Not looking forward to > doubling the number of files just so I can use Workbench to > load them. You have just described Browser, a shareware program written by Peter da Silva. It has appeared on a couple of fish disks and here on the net. Peter is wrapping up some major improvements and, last time I talked to him about it, he was planning to repost it, after flirting for a while with the idea of selling it. -- -- "We've been following your progress with considerable interest, not to say -- contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV -- uunet!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018
kudla@pawl17.pawl.rpi.edu (Robert J. Kudla) (12/21/88)
In article <2637@m2-net.UUCP> ba@m-net.UUCP (Bill Allen) writes: >like expanding windows, etc) has anyone seen a program that >allows generic icons to appear for files that don't have >companion.info files? I have a hard disk with 1000's of Really! I _really_ want a program which would do that, as then I might be able to use workbench and not have to call it utterly useless. It _is_ more memory efficient than my CLI with all its billion enhancements..... might even tempt me to iinstall WB on a few disks. -----------Robert J. Kudla - Ex-Pseudo-Freshman Extraordinaire----------- // Don't surround yourself \ Itt@RPITSMTS.BITNET \\ // with yourself.... \ USERFW3S%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu \X/ / \ kudla@pawl.rpi.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------