🚀 go-pugleaf

The Rooms metaphor was based on some good basic research, so it isn't
surprising to find its ideas present in some popular older systems as
well... including those without the window metaphor.  Xerox went through
a number of other systems first, including Bigscreen (a huge space onto
which you peer through a smaller window), before hitting on it.  Henderson
and Card did a superb presentation of the progression at CHI+GI'87.  Only
time I've seen a technical paper get a standing ovation...

Bigscreen is back, horribly, on the Mac - an ill-conceived clone that moves
the screen around to the unseen edges of the 'bigscreen' if your pointer hits
the sides.  Since the Mac likes to put certain important things, like the 
Trash can and main hard disk, at the far corners of the screen, and puts
scroll bar active areas in the corners of windows, this means you are always
doing it accidentally and throwing your screen off, especially if you have a
full page monitor.  The Mac also has lots of software (including system 
software) that will put moded dialogs right-in-the-middle of the screen 
(making it shift if the dialog is wide enough).  Thank heaven at least the
menu bar stays in the right place... but any interface based on pulldown menu
bars simply doesn't work well with a big screen - you have to move your mouse
from one side of the screen to another, every few seconds... probably making
it shift.

I think the thing started as a way to avoid the always-clumsy scroll-bar 
mechanism, and provide another way for getting around, if you didn't
have a full page monitor.  There is another solution to this, which is a
Mac hack distributed free by Bill Buxton and Bill Gaver at CHI'90, so I
understand, that lets a Mac have a trackball *as well as* a mouse... and
lets you scroll with the trackball (in your off hand) as you point with the 
mouse.  This seems to be the simplest solution, and seemingly the best
analog to paper, where you often hold/steady the page/book with one hand and 
write with the other.  In my own experience, I have found trackballs to be
typically 10-30 times faster than typical scrollbars for finding a particular
place in a text - where I have been able to use them.

Rooms is another way to avoid artificial mechanisms like scrolling, of
course, by saving various views of what could be the same object, for
different task purposes.

Wang's Freestyle uses another metaphor, the stapler, to 'group' windows.
This is a very clear analogy to paper, and provides a lot of the same
capabilities as Rooms.

Some form of grouping and saving-of-state is necessary in window systems.
I think if it were standard there would be less need for ugly half-solutions
like bigscreens and scrollbars...

Craig Hubley

-- 
    Craig Hubley			-------------------------------------
    Craig Hubley & Associates		"Lead, follow, or get out of the way"
    craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca		-------------------------------------
    craig@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu    mnetor!utgpu!craig@uunet.UU.NET