Re: [MacPerl] useful (albeit silly) Mac OS hint

[Charles Albrecht <cwa2@cornell.edu>]

>I wonder if any of these marker ideas has the hope of hawaiian shorts in 
>the arctic of working on Windows? (First, you have to build the heated 
>green-house, you see, ... .)

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. The only problems would be 
a) Nothing can appear "on" the desktop, b) the desktop is obscured 
by a window or c) one can only position items to snap to grid. 
So on Windows it happens to be a link/alias/shortcut rather than a 
physical object - the technique could still be the same.

Any X-based window manager for *nix that allows arbitrary positioning 
of links on the "desktop" would allow the same approach.

>But what really worries me is whether Darwin/Mac OS X can support this 
>kind of convenience? I read between the lines on the announcements, and I 
>can't find reason to hope that the desktop will survive the jump into the 
>new technology. I'd get the Darwin CD and check, but I don't have any 
>hardware to run it on.

Darwin has no graphical interface in its current incarnation. At least 
I don't think anyone's successfully compiled an X Window Server for it. 
It's "just" unix on mach. It certainly doesn't have OS X's Aqua layer 
and desktop paradigm. As with any ordinary *nix, anything it uses 
would depend on the X Window Manager in use.

Without violating non-disclosure on OS X, I can say that OS X Server 
allows for symbolic links/aliases to appear on the desktop and to be 
positioned arbitrarily.


-Charles Albrecht
 cwa2@cornell.edu

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