About
The note pad is a place to quickly jot down notes of things that you want to cover at a later date (e.g. when you have time to do so) but don't want to scribble it on a piece of paper that's going to get lost in five minutes' time :-)
The notes
- Big tab and little tab -- e.g. big tab for panes, little tab for controls.
- For true SDI applications -- where each document window is a separate process, provide a means for keeping settings synchronised
- Have video and DVD playback apps able to suspend video powerdown and screensavers. QuickTime 6 won't do this (!!!) nor will InterActual DVD Player.
- Anyone remember that Windows 3 had a modular UI? By setting the
shell= and taskman.exe= lines of system.ini, you could very easily define which program provided shell and task management services. I used Iain Clifford Heath's Wayfarer shell, and Super Task Manager. Such modifications were official and supported and required no hacks or secret alterations; by default, these lines were set to the default shell (Program Manager) and task manager. So where did we go wrong after that?
- There should be a concept of modifier-independent key-driven actions. That is, the system will recognise a keypress or a key chord as an action trigger even when other keys are already held down and regardless of the state of the GUI. A good reason for this is to permit a key or key chord to fire the screenshot action even if you're in the middle of alt-tab or whatever.
- The window manager needs a clue. I am too fed up of alternative alt-tab implementations popping up underneath existing windows, programs having dialog boxes become detached such that the program no longer even knows it has a dialog open and the dialog itself is locked out as though the parent window was the dialog, and always-on-top windows hiding each others' tooltips.
- The GUI needs to be independent. For example, Mac OS X and Windows both lose control of many UI operations if the frontmost program is hung. Windows won't screenshot a hung task because, I imagine, it feels it must offer Print Screen to that application to capture before letting the default action take place. Mac OS X's unified menu bar shared between the frontmost app and the OS means that a hung app locks out the Apple (system) menu -- including Apple > Force Quit -- until you first use an alternative means to pick a responding app and regain the menu from there. The GUI should remain first and foremost in the user's control and in charge of its own job, not allowing programs to ever hijack it.
- Along a similar vein... We put a protected audio CD into an iMac last night, latest iTunes and Mac OS X (my sister's Mac). iTunes played 25 seconds of track 1 (we think -- there was no sound and I forgot that the mute key might have been inadvertently hit) and then locked up. The entire machine then proceeded to run at about 1 kHz but with iTunes dead and the Force Quit dialog locked out. The Finder was all but dead, the Dock was mostly dead ...
I just wonder what went wrong and how to make sure we don't make the same mistake! I am guessing either the window server went down or the filing subsystem hung on a dead CD drive and locked out all access to discs
- btw I had an idea -- I was thinking, the reason why my desktop is a mess is that it's a good place to reach from any app. (Damn, my fingers are going too numb to type)
But why? Because, for example, after I save a file, I have to walk the next app through finding the file to use it. Windows has Start > Recent Documents (or something, I have it turned off) but it's not easy to use: it relies on the user having to realise you can right-click menu items in the Start menu. And odds are, the next task to perform won't even *be* a valid right-click action, such as "Add to existing mail being written, compose window #3" or "Upload to server at FTP window #2".
You need a way to work with recent files without them having to go all over the desktop ... For example, a global palette of recently-saved files that you can toggle?
