[141] in Athena User Interface
Re: Updated AUI project summary
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Thu Jun 8 00:37:35 2000
Message-Id: <200006080437.AAA14328@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
cc: beland@MIT.EDU, aui@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 07 Jun 2000 22:53:11 EDT."
<200006080253.WAA05098@manatee.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 00:37:30 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 6/7 Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> A suggested alternative is to have each menu represent the contents of
> a locker. There could be a SIPB menu, with pine, exmh, and vim, an
> infoagents menu with netscape 4, netscape 3, and lynx, a matlab menu
> with matlab, etc. The problem with this is that it groups things
> according to administrative control, not use. You don't want a menu of
> things that SIPB maintains, you want a menu of communications tools, a
> menu of engineering tools, etc. A solution to this is to use the same
> technical solution as you would if each submenu were a locker, but
> introduce extra lockers for specicfic categories of program (I think
> this is what Beland called "virtual lockers").
>
> These would be real lockers, just like any other. For example, there
> could be an "engineering" locker that contained attachandrun scripts
> for matlab, maple, ProE, hspice, autocad, and whatever else is common
> for engineers to use. This solves the problem of administrative
> control, because people are able to choose their own set of lockers,
> which can be maintained by anyone. It also means that in the general
> case, programs can be grouped by functionality, instead of by who
> controls them.
I agree with this, except for a caveat about lameness. I fear that
attempting to implement this sort of thing will be a lose because no
one will ever get around to making these lockers. Do people disagree?
On a not-unrelated-note, I plan to hack up a GUI "manage my locker"
tool that will allow people (ie professors) to manage the submenu that
people will get when they add the professors locker. This may actually
be {related to/a generalization of/a specific use of} a generic menu
configuration tool. ie, random users could use the same tool to
configure their personal submenu.
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
