From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,8dffd960b2d9594e X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: collins@cs.wm.edu (Bob Collins) Subject: Re: Decent ADA compiler on a Mac Date: 1995/04/07 Message-ID: <1995Apr7.103615.14612@cs.wm.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 100070382 sender: news@cs.wm.edu (News System) references: organization: The College of William and Mary newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1995-04-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , vladimir@speedy.intrepid.com (Vladimir Vukicevic) wrote: > This is (IMHO) one major shortcoming of the MacOS interface. If you > want to do something fast, there's no way to do it. If you want to get > into the "Foo:Blah:Bar:Quux:Fap:Blat" folder, you have to click-click- > click-click through all those folders, instead of simply typing "cd > Foo:Blah:...". The MacOS is a moving target. Currently, there are numerous utilities available (from Apple and from third parties) to mitigate this problem. Most involve hierarchical menus. For example, place an alias of a directory or volume in a special menu. Then one can travel five-deep through hierarchical menus to a destination directory or file. No double-clicking. One clever paradigm involves the iconic representations of directories (folders). Depress the mouse button while the cursor is over a folder. After a short pause, a menu pops up containing the contents of the folder. This pop-up menu is also hierarchical and can be used for deeply nested items. The advantages of these systems: increased manual dexterity (learned in order to traverse hierarchical menus), saving of some memory cells, and the use of longer directory names (no repetitive typing). The disadvantage: we spend Ada time reading about interfaces. Bob Collins, collins@cs.wm.edu