john13@garfield.UUCP (08/14/87)
-- So, when can we expect to see a turbo version of Workbench, geared towards the user who uses the features of the Workbench for everything, or who has so much memory they don't mind a few extra K eaten up by the user interface? Of course you would want to include both it and the old vanilla Workbench with the system. No reason not to throw as many features into it as possible. Here are a few that come to my mind: - adjust colours of WB screen; by now *everyone* must have the source to one of those colour-gadget windows, right? - set date/time; integrate a tiny clock into the screen title bar - select printer [ integrate as much of Preferences as possible. After all, most of it is only twiddling single bits ] - select input device (eg lightpen, touch-tablet on serial port or mouse port) - select port #1 or #2 for system input device - set number of bitplanes for WB screen a la DropShadow. One of the things that bothered me about WordPerfect was that there were no different colours for different styes of text, and no indication of super/subscript at all except in the status line. Then I realized the screen was only 4-colour... - select screen flash or audible beep (via setfunction) - access to many more C: commands like addbuffers, path, etc. using the graphic interface: slider gadget for number of buffers, click on icon for addition to path, string gadgets and/or icon clicking for assign - more support for "drop an icon on me" applications; renaming across directories and assign'ing to an executable file are already done this way, but that fact is not widely publicized - if you wanted to get fancy, you could alter the startup-sequence in various ways through menu selections (some people [not me] don't like editors): - what assigns should I do on startup? - what devices should I mount? - should I boot a program always? - which? enter name or click icon. - does it take over or do I run it? - should the CLI window go away? should I load Workbench? or maybe a utility called "make startup sequence" on the extras disk I dunno, the plethora of features and *very well done Amiga user interface* of WordPerfect must be getting to me. If I can test out all the features, especially how they have been Amiga-enhanced, in the near future then I'll post a review. But let me say now that the combination of keyboard, mouse movements/button action and menu selections is hard to beat. You can learn the keyboard shortcuts "subliminally" by reading the menus (I find the template difficult to follow), and anywhere you are asked to choose a letter or number you can hit the key OR click on the line of that selection. It also accepts Y/N/Return intelligently when it puts up non-system requesters, and the cursor-key movements with shift/ctrl behave as you would expect. Minor, tongue-in-cheek gripe: "C-Home"? If only the A1000 numeric keys had that good old IBM-style labelling! John -- "She's sort of a 'pit baby', with interlocking jaws. We feed her on chicken parts." "But baby-fighting has been outlawed, hasn't it?" -- Tracy Ullman describing her infant daughter to David Letterman
ralph@mit-atrp.UUCP (Amiga-Man) (08/16/87)
Bravo ! Let's hear it for the development of a "super" workbench.
While were tossing ideas, let's also consider,
- iconization of running programs
- passing other file icons into running programs
- better icon maintenance utilities
- and ---> *FASTER DRAWER OPENING* <---, like by clustering "*.info" files
so it only takes *ONE* file open and read to get a drawer open.
( Oops... maybe this isn't in the workbench, but in the "info" library.)
Sounds like a hot product which, if written well, could achieve a really
high Amiga market penetration. Sheesh...maybe I'll write it.
Although, the folks who *should* write it are the folks who wrote
the original workbench, since they could work from the existing code.
Ralph