Re: Questions

["James R. Dunson" <jdunson@vt.edu>]

At 08:17 PM 12/3/98 -0800, you wrote:
>So in the process of hacking on the new tcl/tk interface, some
>questions came up:
>
>1. Does anybody at all have monochrome screens anymore?  If not,
>terrain display code could get much simpler.

  When you say "monochrome", I'm unsure if you mean *truely* 
monochrome (1-bit), or grayscale.  A fair number of older 
Windows laptops are still grayscale, and many X-Terminals
are greyscale only.  For that matter, at least at the university
here, many workstations and servers for non-graphics tasks are
bought with grayscale-only monitors to save money.  This implies
that a variety of sysadmin type people with networked desks 
on, erm, their lunch-hour perhaps, might be still interested
in grayscale.  

  True monochrome screens are fairly rare; I suspect that few
machines people would want to run Xconq on would have such.  
Unless you want to leave in the code for a possible Palm Pilot
port :)  (Hmm.  Will tcl/tk work under Windows CE?  The palmtops
are getting more powerful; an IR-networked game on a crowd of
near-future palmtops has a certain appeal...)

>2. For people who've used/seen both the Mac and the X11 interface...

  I've only really used the Mac interface, but my general leaning  
these days is toward having a master window of some sort, to 
facilitate easy task-switching.  Ie, only one thing to minimize, or
to (under Windows) Alt-Tab to and from.  Now, it may very well have
sub-windows, subdividable panes, etc.  

  An interesting concept that might allow convienent use by both
folks with small screens (or a need to keep other things visible)
and with plenty of pixels to spare, is to have the ability to call
up an arbitary, or at least reasonably large, number of identical
sub-windows.  Any such sub-window would have a tabbed area across
the top that controls what it's watching or doing; you could use
only one*, and use the tabs to switch it among functions, or you
could spread a bunch of them around, with each set differently
(or perhaps not; the ability to have two seperate zoomed-in 
views of different places might be very handy).  Think along
the lines of the MFDs (Multi-Function Displays) found in modern
high-tech fighters (and their sims), but resizable, draggable, 
and minimizable.  

  At least initially, I'll be happy to see anything that's 
playable practically under W95/W98, where I have to live 
these days.  

** James **
[*] Actually, you probably would want at least two; one for the 
map, one for everything else.  
James R Dunson, Multimedia Programmer
Dept. of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology
Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, Virginia Tech
jdunson@vt.edu