Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac From: info-mac@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.info-mac Subject: Thoughts on what a new Finder should look like Message-ID: <352@uw-beaver> Date: Mon, 7-Jan-85 01:49:19 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.352 Posted: Mon Jan 7 01:49:19 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 7-Jan-85 07:43:07 EST Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 38 From: Greensid%PPL@LLL-MFE.ARPA As more and inexpensive memory becomes available for the Mac, and as extremely large storage devices become available in the near future,the Finder will become rather awkward and inefficient to use. E.g., with 512K memory available, it seems silly to have two copies of an application in memory at once (in RAM disk and wherever it is as it executes). Thecommunity should start discussing what THEY think (as opposed to what Apple thinks) would make a comfortable interface. For example, I would like to see the desktop become a menu item that can be pulled down at anytime to show what applications are running. The mouse could then be used to stop or to start up applications. A stopped application would simply reside in memory unless a new application needs its space, at which time a window could be opened to alert the user and to allow some choices. Multitasking is of course assumed. Further enhancements that I would like to see would be a UNIX like menu that contains the 5 or 10 most commonly used UNIX system commands, such as grep, cat, input and output direction, cd, ar, awk, cmp, sed, sort, tr, and wc. With slow disks and many files, these commands (e.g., cat or grep) are almost impossible to implement with current editors and applications. Another improvement would be to modify the MAC to have an eraseable ROM (say 256K bytes or more) which could be loaded with convenient applications from disk. Anyone who has experienced the joys of running the mac with a RAMdisk knows how painful it is to go back to slow magnetic media. Still other improvements would be startup files (being to create an application of applications, e.g. creating a ramdisk, loading it with certain files, then start up one of the files in ramdisk), which have already been discussed in but have not yet been implemented. The media keeps reporting hints of a new Finder that will have directories. Does anyone out there know what else it will contain? Is Apple thinking of taking the Finder in the direction of Smalltalk? User feedback should be very useful before the new designs are set in concrete.