krweiss@ucdavis.edu (05/04/91)
A thought occurred to me (and it didn't even make my head explode, like last time)... When the IAC/Program Linking capabilities of System 7 mature, are we looking at the end of the concept of a creator tied to a document? The end of the tyranny of the application? It seems that IAC makes it possible to design a generic document handler that does nothing more than provide a skeleton to hold a blank document, and a bunch of hooks to whatever applications the user wants to use to act on the document. Once the user creates those IAC linkages, a new and unique application would exist. Say one with the drawing capability of Freehand mixed with the bitmap manipulation of Photoshop. There wouldn't really be any meaning to the concept of a "creator" for a document made with a combination of IAC linked applications. It may even be possible to mix and match specific tools from different programs, without calling in the entire application. I'm interested in this idea because I provide both telephone and office support to Macintosh users. I forsee a day in the near future when the question "What program are you using?" becomes meaningless. How do you provide software support in a world where every user has customized software? I'm also curious about the nature of the language that will be used to manage IAC. Is AppleEvents rich enough to handle this kind of stuff? Wouldn't it be a bitch if Macintosh becomes the complex, hard to support system, and DOS/Windows is the uniform "every system looks alike" environment... Note that I mean complex from the support perspective, not the end-user perspective. 7.0 makes very complex operations almost transparent to the user -- unless something goes awry. Just rambling... Ken Weiss krweiss@ucdavis.edu