From: dmeyers@mal-s2.gatech.edu (Dave Meyers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: What Apple's GUI is missing (was Re: When is a CLI faster than a GUI?
Date: 29 Sep 92 18:36:53 GMT
Organization: Georgia Tech Res. Inst./Modeling & Analysis Lab

>If you use Think C anyway, you can make generic command line apps
>wo/ problems; just use standard C calls.

That doesn't make these programs necessarily useful.  While it is
nice how Think C gives you a console, and even stdio redirection,
the stdio redirection is primitive.  And it remains quite difficult
to look up the command line options (which are sometimes necessary)
without being able to quickly type "command -?" to get some help.
This will be addressed in more detail shortly.

>|> GUIs _are_ the future!  They are developing quickly and gaining features
>|> at an amazing rate.  Only Apple's GUI is not keeping up with this
>|> explosive growth.

>Is it not? Please defend this statement. Tell me what
>sorta great stuff is appearing in other GUIs that Apple is
>missing. Apples UI does change and improve over time, but
>not "explosively", as this would blow away any consistency
>in it.

Drag and drop ACROSS APPLICATION WINDOWS.  Drag and drop is a vast
improvement over the capabilities of previous Mac finders, wherein
one had to select a bunch of files at once, which often required 
dragging them all to the desktop first, as well as the appropriate
application, if it was not the creator app.

The problem is that drag and drop even as it is now is quite primitive.
You don't have any control over the function of the d-n-d apps.  At
present, the vast majority of them simply open the file.  A couple
do other things, like Save-A-Tree (a GREAT app!), which prints them.

But, we still lack useful configurable filter-type apps with good
drag and drop interfaces.  Try, for example the following as an
idea:

Grep (for those non-unix-weenies out there, this is a powerful
multi-file pattern-matching search program).  If one had a grep
application on the mac, it might work as follows:  double click
on the grep app, and it pops up a configuration window, where
you enter the search string, perhaps set some options, like 
case-sensitivity, etc), then say ok, and the app quits and closes
up.  Then, you can drop batches of files (or, hopefully, aliases
and folders!) onto the icon of the grep program, and it returns
either a text file, or an apple-event to a text editor to open
the text file containing the search results.  This would be great,
except that as far as I know, it doesn't yet exist.  But it is
a pain to have to configure it that way, and the batches of 
files to drop into it are going to be a pain to create, too, and
as yet, I know of no way to create representations of collections
of files (although a folder full of aliases might be a solution).

On other platforms, (eg. the Sun running OpenWindows), one is able
to drag icons from the directory viewer DIRECTLY INTO THE ACTIVE
WINDOW OF ANOTHER APPLICATION.  So, one can open up the configuration
window of the above imagined grep-program, and while the config 
window is still on the screen, simply drop the icons representing
the batches of text files right into the 'hot spot' of that config
window.  This is not possible under the Mac GUI, and I believe that
it or something like it will be essential for the future development
of useful drag and drop type programs.

Any other ideas out there?

--David
-- 
+++ David S. Meyers (dmeyers@math.gatech.edu)  *** PGP key avail.! *** +++
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy