t-jacobs@utah-cs.UUCP (Tony Jacobs) (08/23/87)
I've got what I believe is a great idea to go with the new 6.0 Finder and Juggler. Create an additional module that is optional (like the Juggler is) that will allow you to integrate the output of any combination of applications. It would be like a page-layout shell of sorts. It could also allow for multiple people on a network to be working on the same document. The main task would be for it to manage what goes on a page or in a document and who is working on which region. You could call it the "Mixer" or "Pager". I came up with this idea one day back in '86 when I was thinking how neat all the different managers in Apples software were. I thought what we really need is a "Page Manager" that controlled what went onto a blank page. All you need is a special print driver that would output to a document instead of the printer. Now you're probably thinking "oh, he's just describing Glue" Well, it is very much like Glue only a lot more. I did think this up before I ever heard of Glue. What I also wanted was a way to view documents quickly without having to open up an application. The Page Manager would keep track of regions on a page or group of pages and remember what application put them there. You would just double click on a region and it would crank up the owning application. This way you could have a document with regions created by many different applications. You could also have many different people working on different regions of the same document. The Page Manager would allow you to move regions around from place to place and perhaps do some very basic editing. You could resize things and change their stacking order. Regions could overlap or continue to another region or page. What really would be neat is to have these different regions related to each other or pass information back and forth. This is starting to get a lot fancier than it perhaps needs to be but I just want to illustrate some of the directions you could go with this idea. I began to have some cross over with ideas of implementing unix features in the Macintosh environment. For example: you could have a region that is created by one application and a second region that is a product of an application that uses the first region as input. This gives you a type of pipe-lining. You might have an Excel region as input for a graphic region for a CAD program. Change the Excel region and the Page Manager might be smart enough to go ahead and crank up the CAD application to recreate the graphic region. I hope by now your imaginations are cranking out other scenarios. There is of course a lot of things one does on a computer besides print documents. The Page Manager could also mix parts of input and output from programs that aren't really used for printing. That starts to get trickier because your not using the print mechanism. But with the Juggler running you could have a window that is really an overlay of more than one application. If you have a large display then you can do this already with many windows spread out how you like. What the Page Manager could do is keep a "set" of regions from multiple applications in one window that could be saved for recall later. It could also facilitate talk between applications. A lot of these ideas are really just trying to implement some of the more powerful features of unix into the Macintosh environment. This perhaps would blow a hole in the Page layout market because that is essentially what this Page Manager would be. The big difference is that you could pick and choose your own favorite applications to use. Word for text, MacDraft for graphics, Cricket graph for charts, etc. I originally though that it would be best if this were built into the Finder. I explained my ideas to Andy Hertzfeld to see if he was interested in incorporating them in the Servant. His reply was that it was "next generation of user interface" kind of idea. With the new Finder taking a kind of modular approach (if the Juggler and DA handler are indeed going to remain separate modules) I thought perhaps the Page Manager could become a module by itself. The module idea is quite good for all the different preferences people might have. If you don't want to Juggle then you don't have to waste space with Juggler and DA handler files. If you had a "Pager" module and didn't want to use it then you wouldn't have to waste space with it either. There's probably other modules that could be added to the Finder as an option. I don't think it would be hard to implement the basic idea. Granted it will take some work to have related regions. The Pager documents would have to contain a copy of the real applications output but none of the data structure behind it. I would think you would just want to have I offer these ideas to the net and Apple to discuss. If you have ideas of your own to add, PLEASE DO. The Macintosh is a great thing because a lot of people organized many good ideas into a working whole. I think the greatest thing the Mac does is "let" you be creative. If Apple can harness all the creative power of it's user base they will have a distinct edge. I believe Apple has listened to users in the past and this should be a good test to see if Apple still has an ear to hear. Tony Jacobs Center for Engineering Design University of Utah t-jacobs@ced.utah.edu