dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott) (11/21/90)
|> In article <THOTH.90Nov18145145@reef.cis.ufl.edu>, |> > Where the heck is our Athena filechooser widget!? Why do motif, |> > Macintoshes, Interviews and Khoros have filechooser widgets and the |> > bloody athena toolkit just has a text widget with no filename |> > completion. Almost turns me off. One of the advantages to the Mac file chooser is that it is connected to the OS as well as to the windowing system. This allows for nice system additions like Boomerang, DFaultD, ShortCut, and others. These additions provide popup/pulldown menus containing frequently-used files and folders and services such as filename pattern search. It seems to me that one (or both) of the following might be very useful in this regard: 1. A file selection protocol. A client would call a standard routine (XmuGetUserFileName?) which would connect to a file selection service. The service would actually be an X client of the user's choosing. A socket connection and simple protocol would allow for application filtering. If no such service is available, the toolkit would use its own internal mechanism. The big advantage to this is that it allows for a global mechanism that users can modify and configure for themselves. After all, nobody is going to win the user interface war any time soon. Why not give ourselves some kind of continuity now? 2. A "frequently-used" file database. The toolkit file chooser would provide a means for selecting items from a frequently-used file and directory list (probably set up so that each client "stamps" an entry with its name, so that the frequently used files for that application can be found quickly, but the others would still be viewable). This would allow for each toolkit to define their own file chooser while still using common data. -- ...David Elliott ...dce@smsc.sony.com | ...!{uunet,mips}!sonyusa!dce ...(408)944-4073 ..."I can't believe it. You actually found a practical use for geometry!"