Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!dp1g+ From: dp1g+@andrew.cmu.edu (Demetri Patukas) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Dragging windows off-screen Message-ID: <0WUwYSy00XcSE5VEEN@andrew.cmu.edu> Date: 8 May 88 02:34:06 GMT Organization: Carnegie Mellon Lines: 42 How come mac people can drag their windows off the edge of the screen and we can't? It seems to me that being able to drag windows (partly) off the screen would improve intuition a whole lot. It feels very confining to have my windows bump up against the edges of the screen, whereas being able to push them off the edge gives the illusion of having and infinitely large plane of pixels, and the screen is looking at just one part of it. I suppose that I can achieve nearly the same effect by resizing a window and then moving it, but there are some non-resizable windows around (and resize/move would be two layers operations, instead of just one). Rather than just complain, I actually do have some suggestions as to how this could be implemented. It seems there are two basic approaches. In the first, we only change intuition.library, and have the window be resized as it is dragged "off the screen." I would be willing to bet, though, that most programs behind unresizeable windows would not take kindly to having someone else mess with their window.width and window.height. Time for approach number two. Start by having intuition allow the mouse to move over the whole screen while dragging a window, rather than constraining the pointer to keep the window on the screen. But then layers is going to get upset when it tries to render into a window that has visible pixels that aren't on the screen. So we need to add some "virtual" layers so that the areas that extend past the end of the screen are clipped, just as if they were obscured by other windows. Any comments? Could this happen in some future release of the OS? (stay tuned for the next exciting post: the right way to do typeahead) internet: dp1g+ @ andrew.cmu.edu Demetri Patukas -------------------------------------------------------------------- Whenever you're writing code, think to yourself, "Oh, this is another thing that poor Richard Stallman will have to duplicate." And this will put a whole new light on your work. -Richard M. Stallman (Support the Free Software Movement)