Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!decwrl!spar!freeman From: freeman@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Jay Freeman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: 'Virtual' Folders - good idea!! Message-ID: <1437@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> Date: 23 Jun 88 22:53:15 GMT References: <46100167@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: freeman@spar.UUCP (Jay Freeman) Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research Lines: 38 In article <46100167@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> hirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > then let "virtual folders" have an entirely different characterization > in the desktop paradigm. For example, you might characterize a > "virtual folder" as a sheaf of documents held together by a paperclip. I think that's a useful idea. How about a simple implementation as a display hack: Suppose it worked that whenever I positioned two icons so that they overlapped, the finder noticed it and instead of displaying two overlapping icons it displayed just one icon, a sheaf of documents held together by a paperclip. One could presumably then grab that icon and move all the documents as one; indeed, almost any selection of that icon would be immediately interpretable as a selection of all the clipped-together documents. Exception: I think I would like all the special commands that reorganize the desktop to continue to preserve clipped-together documents, and I would like an additional menu command to spread apart the documents in a (selected) clipped-together sheaf. Maybe there should also be a way to peel the top document off a sheaf, like using a modifier key when mousing on it. If it were done this way, then there would be no need for a special, "make-virtual-folder" command; you'd make a pile of things by putting one thing on top of another, just as we all do with real desktops. (Surely a computer interface for the rest of us should preserve the paradigms whereby we create and manipulate messes.) And at a slightly lower level, the finder info data structure for a file would not need to be changed; it already contains position information and that's all the finder would need to determine whether to display individual icons or clipped-together bunches. I think I would want this hack to work with full-sized or miniature icons, but I think I would like the displays of documents by name, kind, date and so forth to list all documents in a folder, whether or not they were clipped together. -- Jay Freeman