kent@lloyd.camex.uucp (Kent Borg) (10/05/88)
An idea I hope someone at Apple will think about... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- On page 15 of today's MacWeek is a photo of 4 Macintosh screens in a row being used as a financial trading station. The monitors are set in a nice arc with a nice counter in front of them. Looks real cool. They are presumably all hooked up to a single Macintosh II. (Haven't actually read the article yet...) Then I notice there is only one mouse. After all, you can have more mice than that you could have a couple so one is always handy, mice are cheap compared to color CRTs, why not? Let me think, hmm, each time you grabbed a handy mouse you would have to find the elusive cursor in those acres of phosphor. [Light bulbs start going off in my brain...] Why not have many cursors on a desktop? How's that for multitasking? Or, better yet, why not extend the idea of several monitors forming a larger desktop to a multiprocessing situation of having desktops of different Macs being adjacent? What would it mean for me to reach over onto to the next desktop and grab a MacWrite document and drag it back to my desktop? Then grab a calendar desk accessory window and drag it from my desktop to the next one over? Reach over to the next desktop and open a document on that desktop? Notice that some slow number crunching god-knows-what is slowing down my computer and drag it over to the next desktop to let that computer do it? Using Unix based Suns here at Camex I have grown to like rlogin, where I can hop onto another machine on our ethernet (you arpanet folks can do it cross-country). I would like to be able to do that on a Mac. Go grab a hunk of some other Mac's desktop and do things there. A little like Timbuktu where Macs can mirror each other, except have them maintain their individual indentities. Some questions: 1) What would it mean to have two pointers on a single desktop? Modal dialogs, spring-loaded modes, tool selection are all strange things to rethink. Should the cursors be identical, each capable of producing events, but in the identical context, or should they somehow have individual contexts? If they shared a single context, would they grab it a way similar to how multiple mice currently grab the pointer? 2) What would it mean to drag a window from one desktop to another? Would the environment of that application be saved, and then the application restarted at that point on the other Mac? Could a window be allowed to sit part way on both desktops, active on one but not the other? Clicking on it would grab the context from the other machine and give it to a suspended copy of the application? 3) Could a single machine's desktop contain windows that are running on another machine? Are windows seen multiply only by virtue of annexing desktop from another machine? 4) How would a machine annex the desktop of a machine with more monitors? What would it mean to annex desktop from a machine that itself has annexed desktop? (in Unix terms an rlogin to an rlogin) Is annexing logically nested or flat? Would there be a notion of public desktop that can be annexed and private desktop that cannot? Would annexed desktop have different appearance? Comments? Kent Borg kent@lloyd.uucp or hscfvax!lloyd!camex