Re: Fully encapsulated executable files with support...

[charles j hagenbuch williams edu]

Quoting Christopher Curtis <ccurtis@ee.fit.edu>:

> You have an icon called "diff".  It has two input "pipes" and one output
> "pipe".  If you drag a file onto it, one pipe end turns red and is maybe
> labeled "x/".  Then you drag "y/" onto it and the other pipe turns red,
> and the output pipe starts flashing green.  Selecting the green light
> would bring up a menu or someting giving you the option to save as a file,
> append to a file, view, or pipe to another program.  If you select pipe
> the cursor changes or a new icon appears, and this can then be dropped
> onto a "mail" icon, or dropped into a mail application as an attachment.
> Right clicking the icon would bring up the properties for "diff".

I don't know if this is the way to do it, but I've thought graphical pipes
would be a really really cool thing to do for a while. Here's a different
example that I think might make it seem a bit more attractive to some people:

You have icons on your desktop that represent the programs, say, convert,
ppmtogif, whatever. You take any graphic from a file manager window, and
drag it to, say, convert. Convert can produce all kinds of different output,
so a pop-up menu appears with a list of operations that you'd like convert
to do on the file. It should let you select more than one - ie, convert this
file to a jpeg and also apply a charcoal effect to it.

Once you choose the options you want, convert does it's thing, and then the
icon of the graphic changes to represent the new format - a subscript,
different picture - this should be user configurable. It also should have
some indication that it's not a file - a pipe somewhere in the icon,
something. Then it just sits there - it's not attached to the mouse, it
doesn't force you to do anything with it.

If you want to save it as a file, you drag it to a filemanager window. It
appears there with a blank name, waiting for you to type the name and hit
return - once you do, it's saved in that directory.

If you want to perform another operation on it, you just drag it to another
"desktop pipe". If you want to view it, you drag it to ee or gimp or
whatever, and whatever viewer you picked opens with the file in it. If you
decide you didn't really want it, you right-click on it and select "cancel"
or "discard" or something similar, and it disappears.

You could do the same thing for text filters, etc. Programs that needed
multiple files (like ones to make animated gifs) could by default not
operate on the first file dropped on them, but simply accumulate inputs and
wait for you to click on the program to tell it to "go" or how to handle the
input.

I think one of the important things in my example is that the cursor doesn't
change - you are never forced to continue operating on a file. I think this
does give you something beyond the command line, because you can do things
step-by-step, while still having the power of pipes, and it handles multiple
inputs better (how would you pipe 100 files to convert and then all to a
program that made each image a frame in an animation, in one step, on the
command line).

Please let me know if I was unclear in any way - I think it would be *very*
useful, not to mention damn cool, to have a desktop that worked this way.

-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chagenbu@wso.williams.edu>, http://osmos.ml.org
--
"sleep comes from acorns." - jess