dp1g+@andrew.cmu.edu (Demetri Patukas) (05/08/88)
How come mac people can drag their windows off the edge of the screen and we can't? It seems to me that being able to drag windows (partly) off the screen would improve intuition a whole lot. It feels very confining to have my windows bump up against the edges of the screen, whereas being able to push them off the edge gives the illusion of having and infinitely large plane of pixels, and the screen is looking at just one part of it. I suppose that I can achieve nearly the same effect by resizing a window and then moving it, but there are some non-resizable windows around (and resize/move would be two layers operations, instead of just one). Rather than just complain, I actually do have some suggestions as to how this could be implemented. It seems there are two basic approaches. In the first, we only change intuition.library, and have the window be resized as it is dragged "off the screen." I would be willing to bet, though, that most programs behind unresizeable windows would not take kindly to having someone else mess with their window.width and window.height. Time for approach number two. Start by having intuition allow the mouse to move over the whole screen while dragging a window, rather than constraining the pointer to keep the window on the screen. But then layers is going to get upset when it tries to render into a window that has visible pixels that aren't on the screen. So we need to add some "virtual" layers so that the areas that extend past the end of the screen are clipped, just as if they were obscured by other windows. Any comments? Could this happen in some future release of the OS? (stay tuned for the next exciting post: the right way to do typeahead) internet: dp1g+ @ andrew.cmu.edu Demetri Patukas -------------------------------------------------------------------- Whenever you're writing code, think to yourself, "Oh, this is another thing that poor Richard Stallman will have to duplicate." And this will put a whole new light on your work. -Richard M. Stallman (Support the Free Software Movement)
peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (05/10/88)
In article ... dp1g+@andrew.cmu.edu (Demetri Patukas) writes: > How come mac people can drag their windows off the edge of the > screen and we can't? I brought this question up about six months ago, and also noted that it's really not that much of an extension. Intuition already supports offscreen bitmaps, and there's not that much difference between dragging a window near the back of the window stack behind another window (you can stop and verify that that works :->) and dragging it off the screen. The changes would have to be made to layers.library to properly split the windows clipping rectangles into two or three extra slices, and to intuition to properly clip those xor-ed lines when you drag the windows around. As Demetri pointed out, this would do wonders for the perceived size of the display. It wouldn't cause any real problems for programs, since you can't drag a window to anywhere the mouse pointer can't point, you would always be able to get to the drag bar. Another thing that would increase the display size would be scrolling menus: when you're mousing through the menus and you get to the bottom it should scroll the menu up as the mouse moves down. Deluxe Paint would immediately benefit. -- -- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter -- "Have you hugged your U wolf today?" ...!bellcore!tness1!sugar!peter -- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions, these are *values*.
mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu.UUCP (05/12/88)
> What about windows that automatically resize themselves, like console > windows under ConMan, or the Tri-View windows in Sculpt-3D to name a > few? These windows could easily dissapear completely if they were > partly off screen, with no way to get them back since you couldn't > get the mouse on them to activate them. When Intuition resizes a window, it can very easily check to see if all of the window will be off-screen and move the window to a place where enough of it is on the screen to allow the mouse to grab it. The Mac will do this if you try to move the title bar of a window off the top of the screen. Don't forget it is Intuition that ultimately controls window operations, *not* your application. --M Michael Portuesi / Carnegie Mellon University ARPA/UUCP: mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu BITNET: rainwalker@drycas "Memories are uncertain friends, when recalled by messages" -- OMD, "Messages"