Re: Mail - dumbed down to the point of pointless

In message <qhqun417pibr1bvpo0vgsq7se7c0vbibmq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:44:53 +0000, Graeme Wall
<Graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In message <01mun4pcoibb39sp76ccmbqrp5vkhldcdb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:51:43 +0000, Graeme Wall
<Graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In message <76hun4dgk6k48j762g27fe8c85i90f62ve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Is the intelligence an OS service, or just a particularly clever swiss
army knife of a text editing application that happens to be delivered
as part of the OS install?

A bit of both. You can force any file to open in the text editor of your
choice by shift doubling clicking on it, that's the OS function.

Ah - once you have that, then clearly you need a program that can take
anything (and it'll be a text editor too because that's what they say
it should be).

Quite! If you want to edit the code you'll need an editor :-)

It's rare on most platforms for anyone to be editing code...! And most
code files will be associated with an editor anyhow, so why an
alternate launch?

In general usage, people want to view the content of files in the
appropriate manner - pictures for jpegs, rendered docs for PDF, text
for ASCII.

The background to RISCOS from its early days of the BBC and Archimedes, was
that it is an easy machine to develop on. So the ability to edit code was a
natural requirement.


OSX has quicklook (10.5) and preview.app, and you can drop any file
onto Preview in the dock if you like.

Tnere's nothing like Preview on RISCOS. I've not played with quicklook
yet.

Select a file, press space. For filetypes QL knows about (it's an
extensible plugin type thing that third parties can add to) it'll
display the content.

Cor, so it does! That will be handy. Ta.


There's certainly no reason why someone couldn't write a "text editor"
that behaved the same way as the RISC/OS one, but I don't see that many
people would see any point overloading a text editor (and TextEdit.app
plus TextWrangler pretty much covers the text editing space) when there
are already other facilities in place to act as a previewer.

The RISCOS version doesn't act as a previewer, it shows you the code, so
if you shift double click on a jpeg you'll get a page full of text
starting jfif and so forth.

Oh, ok. Then OSX and Windows will both let you drag any file onto an
appropriately capable editor launch icon and see the file content.
TextWrangler and Notetab respectively will do that.

Dragging a jpeg onto TW shows me the picture.

Not quite the same as a shift-doubleclick, but not too far away. Linux it
probably depends on how the window manager behaves, but you can certainly
do the same in Gnome and KDE4.

The different editors then serve you up the appropriate mode for that
type of file, eg HTML. Text Wrangler does that, at least for HTML,
not tried anything else. Minor problem with the latter is when you
edit an HTML file using it, you can't export it as an html file that
will automatically open in a browser when you click on it. At least
I haven't discovered how.

You can change the opener of a file in the rightclick/File Info panel.
Daft of TW to take ownership like that though.

If you save the file it has the TW icon, so obviously when you click on it
again TW claims it.

The two things are separate - you can change the icon and associated
primary app individually.

That's the bit I haven't worked out how to do yet, I did it the quick and
dirty way, FTP'd it to the RiscPC and then back again, hey presto it's now a
Safari icon!

But yes, generally if an app applies its own
doc icon it'll also take possession. The question is, should TW do
that? I'd say no, it shouldn't mess with the associations.

The file was created in TW, though it recognised it as html and applied the
appropriate colour scheme and checking regime.


Trying to work out how I right click with a one button mouse... That's
something I really must get round to changing.

I use an 11 button mouse with my computers.


That's just showing off :-)

Actually it was the one single thing I had most trouble with switching from
RISCOS to the Mac, I'm used to a default 3 button mouse and keep trying to
right click or centre click to bring up the menu.

--
Graeme Wall

My genealogy website <www.greywall.demon.co.uk/genealogy>
.

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