goodman@cdp.UUCP (05/25/90)
> ps Watch out, your comments to Mr. Goodman might show up on > his Saturday Noon radio show on KALW: Your Expanding Infosphere. I hope Dick's caveat was offered in jest. I've been a net participatnt for many years and I wouldn't use another participant's comments in one of my broadcasts without first having: a) verified its authorship and b) obtaining permission. Harry Goodman goodman@cdp.uucp USPS: PO Box 808, Sausalito, CA 94965 MaBell: 415/332-5945
cyberoid@milton.acs.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (05/25/90)
I came in in the middle of the conversation. Can someone fill me in on the Xerox rooms? I presume these are experimental sites for testing various groupware concepts, and perhaps one particular concept for future application... but now that Silicon Valley is so far away, it's difficult to test these preconceptions. One issue raised by the adoption of the "group room" concept is that it labels one place as collaborative, in effect reducing every other place to something less, individualis- tic or whatever. But perhaps we want to move the collective space around -- first I have it, then you have it, then it goes somewhere else (in limbo or to a third person). Are there experiments where the group space itself is trans- ported, figuratively, from place to place? (Hi, Dick, it was good to see you at Asilomar. Not having spoken with you at Hackers, I didn't appreciate your sense of humor or your incisive critical faculties. It was a pleasure to see them in action!)
craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Craig Hubley) (05/29/90)
The Rooms metaphor was based on some good basic research, so it isn't
surprising to find its ideas present in some popular older systems as
well... including those without the window metaphor. Xerox went through
a number of other systems first, including Bigscreen (a huge space onto
which you peer through a smaller window), before hitting on it. Henderson
and Card did a superb presentation of the progression at CHI+GI'87. Only
time I've seen a technical paper get a standing ovation...
Bigscreen is back, horribly, on the Mac - an ill-conceived clone that moves
the screen around to the unseen edges of the 'bigscreen' if your pointer hits
the sides. Since the Mac likes to put certain important things, like the
Trash can and main hard disk, at the far corners of the screen, and puts
scroll bar active areas in the corners of windows, this means you are always
doing it accidentally and throwing your screen off, especially if you have a
full page monitor. The Mac also has lots of software (including system
software) that will put moded dialogs right-in-the-middle of the screen
(making it shift if the dialog is wide enough). Thank heaven at least the
menu bar stays in the right place... but any interface based on pulldown menu
bars simply doesn't work well with a big screen - you have to move your mouse
from one side of the screen to another, every few seconds... probably making
it shift.
I think the thing started as a way to avoid the always-clumsy scroll-bar
mechanism, and provide another way for getting around, if you didn't
have a full page monitor. There is another solution to this, which is a
Mac hack distributed free by Bill Buxton and Bill Gaver at CHI'90, so I
understand, that lets a Mac have a trackball *as well as* a mouse... and
lets you scroll with the trackball (in your off hand) as you point with the
mouse. This seems to be the simplest solution, and seemingly the best
analog to paper, where you often hold/steady the page/book with one hand and
write with the other. In my own experience, I have found trackballs to be
typically 10-30 times faster than typical scrollbars for finding a particular
place in a text - where I have been able to use them.
Rooms is another way to avoid artificial mechanisms like scrolling, of
course, by saving various views of what could be the same object, for
different task purposes.
Wang's Freestyle uses another metaphor, the stapler, to 'group' windows.
This is a very clear analogy to paper, and provides a lot of the same
capabilities as Rooms.
Some form of grouping and saving-of-state is necessary in window systems.
I think if it were standard there would be less need for ugly half-solutions
like bigscreens and scrollbars...
Craig Hubley
--
Craig Hubley -------------------------------------
Craig Hubley & Associates "Lead, follow, or get out of the way"
craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca -------------------------------------
craig@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu mnetor!utgpu!craig@uunet.UU.NETsalzman@rand.org (Isaac Salzman) (05/29/90)
In article <1990May29.033706.5681@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Craig Hubley) writes: >Bigscreen is back, horribly, on the Mac - an ill-conceived clone that moves >the screen around to the unseen edges of the 'bigscreen' if your pointer hits >the sides. There is (what I consider to be) a reasonable implementation of the "bigscreen" idea for X11. It's part of the Solbourne Window Manager (swm). I forget what they call it - something like "virtual root" or "virtual desktop". They use a 2D panner that consists of a very reduced view of your entire virtual desktop/root window. You can easily change your current view by moving an outline of the real desktop within the panner. You can also move windows around within the virtual desktop without them being visible on the real desktop. They have a nice way of dealing with the problem of things like menus or trashcans, etc., that you want to access from all areas of the desktop. You can "nail" any window to the real desktop. It's actually more like taping the window to the glass (but it was much easier to make an icon that represented nailing the window than taping the window). No matter where you go in the virtual desktop, the nailed windows stay put. It's possible to customize swm so you can do things like "change wallpaper" when you move to a different part of the virtual root. It's kindof a compromise between the rooms idea and big screens (I think). As far as getting swm. It's part of the OI toolkit, a C++ UI toolkit that Soulborne developed. It can be source liscensed from AT&T sometime towards the end of this summer. I don't know much else about it, except that I'd like to get a copy! Ciao! * Isaac J. Salzman ---- * The RAND Corporation - Information Sciences Dept. /o o/ / * 1700 Main St., PO Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90406-2138 | v | | * AT&T : +1 213-393-0411 x6421 or x7923 (ISL lab) _| |_/ * Internet : salzman@rand.org / | | * UUCP : !uunet!rand.org!salzman | | |
stanh@meyerhof.iaims.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Hanks) (06/01/90)
Speaking of Rooms, how about the Solbourne Window Manager (swm) with it's "Virtual Desktop" feature? Not quite the same as Rooms, but I find it to be a bit more useful.... Stanley P. Hanks Director, Information Technology Planning and Development Baylor College of Medicine, One Baylor Plaza, Houston TX 77030, Mail Stop: IR-3 e-mail: stanh@bcm.tmc.edu voice: (713) 798-4649 fax: (713) 798-3729
dick@cca.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski) (06/02/90)
In article <1138200006@cdp> goodman@cdp.UUCP writes: >I hope Dick's caveat was offered in jest. I've been a net participatnt John, it was a plug for your show, merely couched as a caveat. My brother-in-law Sean McGrath uses that IBM PC Smalltalk at home (is it Smalltalk-V?) and wrote me after seeing my note to say that he had implemented multiple desktops that evening. When I inquired if it helped, he responded that it did, esp. when following a tangent to what he had been engaged in. He set it up so that a single function key switches to the next desktop in the ring. Not too fancy, but it was a quick hack. I like any system that lets one take an idea like rooms and hack out a version in a day or so. Note that the GNU project now offers a FREE Smalltalk system, source included. Many of us now have the iron to use Lisp or Smalltalk effectively on personal machines. Unix was built (to play Spacewar, I think) because Ken had access to an unused PDP-7 lying idle in some storeroom. Given the capable hardware lying about in closets and storage facilities, I expect wonderful things to appear in the next few years as teener hackers get their hands on junker machines. Let me know of the gems you discover.... Dick -- Dick Karpinski Manager of Unix Services, UCSF Computer Center UUCP: ...!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf!dick (415) 476-4529 (11-7) BITNET: dick@ucsfcca or dick@ucsfvm Compuserve: 70215,1277 USPS: U-76 UCSF, San Francisco, CA 94143-0704 Telemail: RKarpinski