🚀 go-pugleaf

My dream is to be able to attach a little Post-it window to any document
displayed in any application. For instance, when I'm replying to mail, I
quite often forget whether I've answered a particular message or not. Imagine
being able to attach a Post-it to the mail message which appeared whenever
you viewed the message. This Post-it window would contain a small message
and (preferably) a hyper-link to some other document, eg my reply mail
message. A database could keep track of these Post-it notes.

I wonder how far we are from an OS architecture that would realize this
dream? Perhaps the rumoured Object Oriented file system would help? You could
have a file which looked and behaved just like a normal ascii file to
applications which access it using the usual Unix file system calls, but
this file system object could be subclassed to provide a richer set of features
(such as my Post-it note) to applications which could understand them. This
would probably mean my Post-it application being automatically launched when
the Mail app opened the message file.

Is this what people mean when they talk about a Document orientated
architecture?

On another note, is it feasable to have a file object that lets you access
it as either ascii or rich text with one of these a subclass of the other?
Which would be the root class?

Well I was going to write a much more basic Post-it application which would
be based on Services. You call the Post-it service with the name of the
current file. I've abandoned that idea because most applications don't offer
the name of the current document to a service. (I believe that NeXT should
add setFilename:/getFilename methods to Window, encouraging developers to
use them [you usually need something like that anyway], and let the
application by default offer this name to Services). Also my favourite
target app for such a service - Mail - wouldn't work anyway since all messages
are bundled up in one big mbox file. (A mistaken hangover from Unix).

BTW, I haven't heard any mention of Mail in 3.0. Is it enhanced in any way?

Dave Griffiths