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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).  The  community 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.