[337] in Zephyr_Comments
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri Jul 7 19:16:34 1989
From: <jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 89 19:14:29 EDT
To: ackerman@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: mar@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, janson@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, zephyr-comments@ATHENA.MIT.EDU,
Cc: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
> Time-to-live is wrong, but for a different reason. It seems (to me) that
> the right approach is to kill exactly one z-gram on each click. Trying to
> figure out (as a user of the system) how many are going to die is unclear.
No one has proposed killing more than one zgram/click, so I'm not sure
you understand our motivation for proposing changes.
The problem is that when zgrams are coming in fast, I fear to click
ANY away, because it is likely that one will pop up under my mouse and
OVER the zgram I am trying to click away WHILE MY FINGER IS ON THE WAY
TO THE BUTTON (this happens very rarely to people who don't get tons
of zgrams at once, but is a nightmare for the rest of us). There is
~.1 sec of dead-time between stimulus and response on a computer
screen event, according to my ex-roommate who does cog. sci. tests
involving these. If a zgram arrives after you've started the clicking
motion with your finger and within ~.1 sec of the mouse button
switch's making contact, you click away the one that has just arrived,
not the one you wanted to click away. You only click away one zgram,
but it's the wrong one, one you've not yet read.
There is a distinction to be made between sorting (using
class/instance/sender/content to decide into which category a zgram
should go), placing (where on the screen, new-on-top/new-on-bottom),
deleting (clicking away), and browsing (fine-sorting by message into
units like stacks of cards, smaller piles, etc.).
I think the function of zwgc when it receives a message should be
limited to the first three -- sorting, placing, and deleting. It
might be an option to place into a stack-of-cards, but once you've
sorted into piles by header info, there's little information to go on
when deciding what to look at first, other than the order they arrived
in. Then you can put them anywhere you want, but that's browsing, and
should be a window manager function. Having a window manager which
could take arguments from a little input window ("dialog box?") saying
in effect "take this pile of windows all named foo and put them in a
stack-of-cards with a good browser" might be really useful, and not
just for zgrams.
--jh--
