Dec 87 Letters
Volume Number: 3
Issue Number: 12
Column Tag: Letters
MacTutor Editorial
Multi-Finder Changes the Game
The arrival of Multi-Finder changes the game for tool makers in the Macintosh
world. When the Mac first came out, the emphasis was on one tool, one job. Consulair C
and TML Pascal followed this design philosophy by making their compiler products
seperate tools. There was the editor tool, the compiler tool, the linker tool and so forth.
Using switcher, these tools could be used very easily, switching back and forth between
them. After a while, this mode of operation fell out of favor as new system
enhancements made switcher unreliable. This led to the creation of the “all-in-one”
environment of LS C and Pascal and the MPW shell. In these products, the tools are not
seperate anymore, but integrated with the shell environment of the tool maker. These
products have become very popular. This change in thinking has also affected
application development. With Pagemaker, the tools for creating layouts were
unbundled and seperate. You use a word processor to create text, a drawing program to
create graphics, and a layout tool like Pagemaker for combining and creating layouts,
using the files created by the other tools. Lately, however, there has been a movement
to return to the large, integrated tool, that does both word processing, graphics and
layout in one. Microsoft Word has expanded into page layout, FullWrite is supposed to
rival Pagemaker, Scoop combines an editor, Paint and Draw program with it’s layout
capabilities. The result of this is that applications are bigger, more complicated and
attempt to do all things for all people. This also makes them harder to debug, so that
products like FullWrite and Scoop run over their ship dates by six months or more,
and products like MS Word ship with bugs, causing a furor in the marketplace.
In the new world created by Multi-Finder, these integrated environments are the
exact opposite of what we want today. Multi-Finder gives the user the opportunity to
create his own integrated working environment, by mixing and matching the tools he
wants open at any one time. The integrated environments prevent this by either not
working at all with Multi-Finder, or by being so big and massive as to make their use
under Multi-Finder impossible without five megabytes of memory!
The New Way of Tool Design
To take full advantage of the new Multi-Finder way of doing things, tools should
go back to the old adage “keep it simple, stupid!”. One tool for one job is our motto. And
each tool should have a re-sizable, dragable window because Multi-Finder operates
best with normal windows. By clicking in the tool’s window, that tool is immediately
activated. The user can then open the tools he wants and arrange their windows on the
screen or screens at his disposal. Also, tools should confine their controls to their own
window, rather than blasting a control all over the screen (as in WriteNow’s ruler).
Normal, scrolling windows should be supported rather than fixed dialog boxes (as in
Absoft’s Fortran). Windows should be moveable rather than fixed (as in Apple’s
MacPaint). MacTutor encourages tool makers, both applications and programming
products, to return to the idea of simple, reliable, one purpose tool making, each tool
in it’s own window. Lets concentrate on creating tool families that can share
information easily and painlessly in the new Multi-Finder environment.
Apple Defines the User Interface
Apple has published a new book with Addison-Wesley that defines the user
interface for Macintosh type computers. Because Apple is trying to port the Mac look
and feel back to their Apple IIgs, the name of the book is Human Interface Guidelines:
The Apple Desktop Interface. But in reality, this is a complete, single volume
statement of how a Macintosh application should look and feel to the user. The book
contains descriptions of the look and feel associated with such new topics as tear off
menus, pop-up menus and hierarchical menus. What is not in the book, and is needed,
is some idea on how the user interface the book describes can be implemented! (I’m
thinking of writing a little booklet that would implement the user interface as Apple
describes it as the Pascal shell example they left out!) Also missing is some discussion
of the philosophy of tool design as I’ve indicated in this editorial, now that
Multi-Finder allows multiple active tools to be sitting around on the desktop. Tools
need to be designed in such a way that they can be confined by the user if he wants to
push that tool off to the side of the screen somewhere. Also missing from the book is a
discussion of tool design for Apple Share, and what constraints that environment puts
on good programming practice. Perhaps we need a volume 2 of the Apple Desktop
Interface: The Developer’s Perspective. Human Interface Guidelines is part of the
Apple Technical Library Series from Addison-Wesley and should be available at the
MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. A must purchase for developers.
Colorizer Fixes Color Problems
Last month, we said you can’t take a snapshot of the color screen. The Colorizer
cDev from Palomar Software does allow you to capture a color screen and to save it as a
color PICT. Eventually the graphics programs will get updated to work with color
PICTS so this will be very useful. A new version, 1.1 is now shipping and we
recommend this product if you have a Mac II. Colorizer is a utility that adds colors to
PICT compatible objects, allowing you to colorize MacDraw and other object oriented
documents. See the mail order store in this issue, or contact them directly at (619)
727-3922.
WriteNow Cures Pagemaker Problems with MacWrite Formatted Files
As we have reported previously, the file filter in Pagemaker for MacWrite
formatted files is buggy and often fails to place the file correctly. A dialog box comes up
and says “you’ve used fonts not in your system file” and so forth. This problem has
been a pain for us since we normally use MacWrite as our “galley editor” tool. This
gives me a chance to again rant and rave about how we need tools for specific jobs.
In setting a magazine every month, you don’t need or want the world’s most
comprehensive word processor. All that stuff just gets in your way. All you really need
is a “galley editor”. Such a product need only set the column width, leading, font, style
and tabs for creating galley strips of editorial. But it must be fast, and bomb proof.
Those strips are then typeset into magazine columns with a page layout program like
Pagemaker. It is much more efficent to keep these two tasks seperate. But Pagemaker
has to be able to read a formatted file and version 2.0 can’t do this reliably with
MacWrite. So we have switched from MacWrite to WriteNow by T/Maker and NeXT,
which apparently owns the copyright. All the editorial in MacTutor is now set up with
WriteNow. A translator program allows MacWrite and Word files to be translated into
formatted WriteNow files. (The translator seems to have problems with Word 3.01,
but you can save word files as MacWrite files, and the translator can convert those to
WriteNow files.)
WriteNow is an excellent example of what I mean by a “galley editor”. It is
simple, fast and obvious, like MacWrite, only better. It conforms to the new tool design
philosophy by doing one thing well, like Filemaker. In fact, I think of it as the
“Filemaker of word processors”. (The only drawback is that it’s ruler is not confined
to a window as it should be to be truly Multi-Finder friendly.) The ability to set the
leading and check the spelling in WriteNow, and have that leading respected by
Pagemaker is what makes this tool so great for use with Pagemaker. As we have
reported before, leading is a design goof in Pagemaker that can waste a lof of time
trying to re-set the results of the auto leading calculation.
What I really like about WriteNow is that it follows the user interface in an
obvious and simple way, unlike MS Word, which tries to go out of it’s way to be
obnoxious. A simple example: you can set bold face type by pressing command-B,
which should be obvious. But Pagemaker requires you to press shift-cmd-B, which is
a physical impossibility for most normal people. I asked them why they did that and
they said “because MS Word does!”. Obviously, they never tested their own interface.
Another example: fonts and style are easily changed, both globally and locally, without
the pain of a messy dialog box like MS Word and Pagemaker require. And the built-in
spell checking is so easy and fast that even I can use it! (No more letters on MacTutor’s
spelling problems!)
So if your looking for a good galley editor for Pagemaker, take a took at
WriteNow. It has multiple windows, spell checking, leading, and simplicity. Once
more, it’s file filter for Pagemaker works correctly. If you write for MacTutor and
have WriteNow, please submit articles as WriteNow files instead of MacWrite files,
although we can easily convert them. Contact T/Maker at (415) 962-0195. Current
version shipping is 1.07, although I am using 1.0 on a Mac II with no problems.
Big Arrays for LS Pascal?
Noel Godlsmith
Melbourne, Australia
In the September issue of MacTutor, you published an article by Daryl Lovato on
how he creates large arrays in TML Pascal (getting around the 32K limitation of the
segment loader). I’ve tried everything and I can’t get this example to work in LS
Pascal. I’ve written to Think also to ask them about this.
[The following unit will demonstrate how to create large arrays in LS Pascal
following Lovato’s example. LS is very picky about things, e specially handles, but the
big problem seems to be that the address returned for a locked handle is not the correct
address at all, but includes the lock bit, which currently is stored in the handle itself.
To get the correct address, you have to clear the high order bit. In the SetElement
routine, you need something like the following: