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
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