robertl@bucsf.bu.edu (Robert La Ferla) (04/30/91)
I agree that it is a great idea however it opens up a whole new can of worms. What you really want to do is to assimilate into another user on your system as in the "su" command. Currently, NeXTStep lacks support for multi-users on a system in the GUI. There is no way to tell who you are on the system from the GUI. What NeXT needs to do is somehow display your identity visually. ie. a GUI version of UNIX's "whoami" Related to this are other user information utilities like "finger", "who", etc... I hope NeXT is working on something along these lines. I hope they are not going to simply create a front-end interface for "finger", etc but rather incorporate it into the Workspace Manager. I haven't thought about how this should be done so I won't offer any suggestions. Dare I bring up the subject of processes in the GUI? I'll save that topic for NeXT week... Robert La Ferla Lotus Development Corporation Advanced Technology Group / Improv
carlos@roo (Carlos M. Salinas) (04/30/91)
In article <ROBERTL.91Apr29205231@bucsf.bu.edu> robertl@bucsf.bu.edu (Robert La Ferla) writes: > What NeXT needs to do is somehow display your identity visually. ie. a GUI > version of UNIX's "whoami" Window color? How about hide/quit by identity functions. > Related to this are other user information utilities like "finger", "who", > etc... I hope NeXT is working on something along these lines. I hope they > are not going to simply create a front-end interface for "finger", etc but > rather incorporate it into the Workspace Manager. I don't understand what you mean by incorporating into the window browser. I can see tieing it in through a services menu (implementation level). The finger could be a visual finger showing a map of your organization, who is using what machine (or is this too Big Brother?). A finger of each user should have pictures, sounds, text, whatever. Sounds like a database is necessary to do a good job. (3.0 DBKit?) And while we're at it how being able to drop files and so forth onto the users spec sheet or machine to transfer files to that person or machine? Program should also have the functionality to initiate talks and other things you usually do after confirming that someone is logged on. > I haven't thought about how this should be done so I won't offer any > suggestions. Dare I bring up the subject of processes in the > GUI? I'll save that topic for NeXT week... > > Robert La Ferla > Lotus Development Corporation > Advanced Technology Group / Improv BTW - Great job on Lotus. Especially the API (although it is procedure based). 'Los
nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk (Nigel Metheringham) (05/01/91)
In <1991Apr30.032854.11649@nntp-server.caltech.edu> carlos@roo (Carlos M. Salinas) writes: >The finger could be a visual finger showing a map of your organization, who is >using what machine (or is this too Big Brother?). A finger of each user should >have pictures, sounds, text, whatever. Sounds like a database is necessary to >do a good job. (3.0 DBKit?) And while we're at it how being able to drop files >and so forth onto the users spec sheet or machine to transfer files to that >person or machine? Program should also have the functionality to initiate talks >and other things you usually do after confirming that someone is logged on. There is a finger program in the Gnu project stuff. I had a quick look at it before we got our NeXTs, and couldn't make it fly.... [from memory - hope my biological simms are in straight] The Gnu finger uses a finger server system, where one machine keeps current user information for a complete network. It also keeps a set of faces (like NeXTmail ?) in one of a number of different picture formats, for sending to the fingerer (the pictures are sent in a network/format independant bitmap protocol). To be made to work on the NeXt you'd need to make the face display code work on a NeXT - should be very easy. I expect you'd then wrap a GUI interface round it. In normal operation you just type finger and get a list of users on all the machines on your network. Fingering a particular person gives information on them including plan, face etc. Anyone interested in getting this going....? [Original Gnu finger code is on prep.ai.mit.edu - the version on there is marked as a beta, and looks like it is still in beta - haven't heard anything on a real release] Nigel. -- # Nigel Metheringham # EMail: nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk # # System Administrator # Phone: +44 904 432374 # # Department of Electronics # Fax: +44 904 432335 # # University of York, Heslington, York, UK, YO1 5DD #