rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) (05/14/88)
I had a thought (first one of the year?) last night after looking
at Tom Rokicki's AReXX version of Emacs. The idea is that with
AReXX and things that support Arexx you can build button boxes.
A button box is a box with labelled buttons. People build them
in labs for experiments. Sometimes they have sliders and pots too.
So you could have, e.g, a button box come up for font selection.
When you hit a button (gadget) it would send the a user-defined
command out the rexx port to the destination programs
Unlike menus the button box just sits where you put it and you
hit the buttons at will- sort of like the calculator.
For example, hitting 'it' button would send an Italic command
out the rexx port. In emacs this might translate to {\it } if you
are in TeX mode, or in the notepad it might turn into the menu
selection for italics, and so on. The point is that the amiga
environment + arexx makes it possible to build all sorts of
button boxes. In addition this moves us to a more object-oriented
domain where messages are sent to things and the things either
take action or say 'i don't get it'.
Button boxes make extensibility easier. All we need is a simple
button box language- which should have maybe 3 keywords. The translator
would read the buttons in and build a 'box', i.e. a window full
of little button gadgets.
Finally, what is a button box like? Like a part of hypercard, maybe?
I don't know ... don't wanna get sued.
--
ron (rminnich@udel.edu)pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve) (05/19/88)
In article <2537@louie.udel.EDU> rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) writes: >I had a thought (first one of the year?) last night after looking >at Tom Rokicki's AReXX version of Emacs. The idea is that with >AReXX and things that support Arexx you can build button boxes. >A button box is a box with labelled buttons. People build them This is exactly one of the things I think the IPCMessage protocol would be good at. The idea would be that clients that wanted to act on buttons would send messages to the "box" asking it to install such and such a button. The box would send a suitable message to the client when that button was hit. Alternatively the box could itself be a client, with a fixed set of buttons; the action taken when a button was hit would then depend on which (if any) server had been assigned by the user to respond to it. -- Pete --
peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (05/22/88)
In article ... pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve) writes: > This is exactly one of the things I think the IPCMessage protocol would > be good at. The idea would be that clients that wanted to act on buttons > would send messages to the "box" asking it to install such and such a > button. The box would send a suitable message to the client when that > button was hit. How? I can't see a symmetrical return channel in IPC. The only message a server can send back to a client is the reply message. I need this facility for Browser. How do I do this in such a way that I get the IPC protection for the client port? -- -- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter -- "Have you hugged your U wolf today?" ...!bellcore!tness1!sugar!peter -- Disclaimer: These may be the official opinions of Hackercorp.