jwz@teak.berkeley.edu (Jamie Zawinski) (10/14/89)
I've only had a few days experience with a MicroExplorer, but the programming interface seemed to me to have some very great flaws. Probably the most absolutely insane thing I discovered was that you can't use :DRAW-LINE, etc to draw in color! Come on, guys! That's what flavors are for - hiding the implementation specifics. There should be a flavor of window which hides the mac toolbox calls. If such a thing existed, then peoply wouldn't have to thing about "using" the mac toolbox - they would get it for free. User-generated resize and close events should just send the appropriate messages. Things like file requesters could be implemented by (for example) a flavor of window that specialized the :PROMPT-AND-READ method. And also, the manuals say that you can't warp the mouse on a microexplorer because the mac hardware doesn't let you... Is this really true? I owned a mac about five years ago, and (unless it was just a dream) I had a program that would record and play back mouse motions (i.e., it warped the mouse). -- Jamie