gourdol@imag.imag.fr (Gourdol Arnaud) (01/26/91)
I have a question about what Apple is planning for future Systems (when I say future, I mean in the next century, when System 7 is released :-) The Finder 7.0 is (IMHO) a great improvement over old Finder. However, as noted recently on the net, it's still not perfect. I was wondering if Apple was planning to open this Finder, as it did for the Mac a few years ago. What I mean is: will third parties be able to add features to the Finder without doing incredible marvelous hacks. For example, will it be possible to add new menu commands or new features thru the drag and play interface. I think the orignial project of the NPA (New Print Architecure) was to allow to drag a document onto a printer icon and have it printed. Fine. But could it be possible to have other icons to which the user could drag icons and that would do something to it. For example, one could imagine a mail system working this way: just drag icons to a mailbox, a dialog appear requiring address to send the document and zip, it's sent. Double click the mail box to see incoming mail. One could also imagine a REAL Macintosh Programming Environment working this way (Note: I *HATE* MPW and I think it's the worst product Apple ever did). You could drag your C files into the icon of a C compiler or your project Makefile into a Make Icon. I'm sure one ca find plenty of good use of this kind of feature. Of course, I presume Apple already though about it (those guys are really thinking much ;-) and found some unsolvable issues in user interface that make it impossible (altough I would be curious to know which). Anyway, this would allow third-parties to build the Finde Extension they want. (By the way, would be nice if there were clean way to build system extensions) (While I'm on my wish list, could it be possible to: (1) Rewrite a clean ROM (I mean consistent) (2) Rewrite the associated doc in a coherent set (as you'll probably be selling RISC Mac before the end of 1992, it would be nice if you'd do MORE than writing an emulator))))) Arnaud. -- /======================//==========================================/ / Arnaud Gourdol. // On the Netland: Gourdol@imag.fr / / // Via AppleLink: Gourdol@imag.fr@INTERNET# / /======================//==========================================/
kent@lloyd.camex.com (Kent Borg) (02/01/91)
In article <17412@imag.imag.fr> gourdol@imag.fr (Gourdol Arnaud) writes: >The Finder 7.0 is (IMHO) a great improvement over old Finder. >However, as noted recently on the net, it's still not perfect. >I was wondering if Apple was planning to open this Finder, as it did >for the Mac a few years ago. Originally 7.0 was supposed to have an extensible Finder. The FileShare that is bundled with 7.0 is an example of a Finder Extension. So the current state of the world is that in the current beta, Finder Extensions exist. The catch is that the programmer's interface for Finder Extentions is not in the current beta of Inside Macintosh VI. Nor are Finder Extensions in any of the talk I have heard form Apple recently. Clearly something has happened to them, but they have not altogether vanished. Rumor: That writing FileShare as a Finder Extension was extremely difficult even when the Finder authors were around to help out--something we outsiders will not have available. That the specs for current Finder extensions will never be made public. My presumption is that by keeping the interface specs secret Apple is free to try to fix them, only FileShare will have to be updated to follow the changes. Let's hope that they can fix the interface and tell us how it works. -- Kent Borg internet: kent@camex.com AOL: kent borg H:(617) 776-6899 W:(617) 426-3577 Kent's Invasion Countdown: I was off by 24-hours.