Another suggestion... Just to confuse things a bit more...

It seems to me that a better metaphor for morphs is not a "dock" (what
does "dock" mean, anyways?  There's no clarity of the concept there...)
but a scrapbook/folder metaphor of some sort... 

Imagine a set of folder tabs along the bottom or sides of the screen,
which you could drag around/manipulate to reorganize, rename, etc.
Click/dragging one up would make it available for dragging or minimizing
morphs into. This is much like the tabs idea currently, but I would hope
it would be more visually represenative of what it does, and have nice
pretty graphical representation.

Combining a scrapbook/folder metaphor with the function of something like
OSX's dock or Window's task bar could be potentially very powerful while
still being immediately intuitive to someone used to either a "normal"
GUI or just learning the GUI metaphors.
 
Imagine having a set of working folders full of processes and morphs and
pictures in minimized or full mode, available at a click, just on the side
of the screen, organized by category or whatnot. 

The way I picture it: when the folder tab is pulled out into one position
(say, just a bar against the side of the screen, like Window's taskbar)
all morphs in it would be present as clickable buttons which would restore
them to the main area. 

But dragging the folder tab out farther would allow full preview mode of
the morphs in the folder in an unshrunk mode, allowing some manipulation.

I think it's a workable, neat concept.

Ryan

 On Wed, 26 Apr 2000, Norton, Chris wrote:

> Hi Folks.
> 
> Russell Allen had some great ideas concerning a MorphDock.  I have given
> much thought to this idea as well.  Please add this item to his wish list:
> 
> +  You should be able to tear/copy a minimized morph off of the dock and put
> it anywhere on your desktop
> 
> In addition to a minimized morph dock, wouldn't it be great to have another
> morph dock that showed a reference (view as icon or as label) for every
> morph on in your World?  Of course, I don't mean all of the submorphs of a
> Browser, but I do mean all menus, SystemWindows, StarMorphs, etc. in your
> World, referenced on a dock.  Then we could add the following kinds of
> properties to this special dock:
> 
> -> center morph (if it is off screen, it would be brought to the center of
> your World)
> -> hide morph (put it off of the screen somewhere)
> -> minimize morph (to the other morph dock)
> -> maximize morph
> -> copy/duplicate morph
> -> throw away morph (to trash can)
> -> delete morph (get rid of all references to it)
> -> inspect/browse/explore morph
> -> fileout morph (file in would be possible too, if you could create a morph
> dock that represents a disk directory)
> -> select several morphs at once and then perform some activity on them
> (i.e. minimize, round up, etc.)
> 
> ... the possibilities are limitless.  I think this would be a great addition
> to a morphic project.
> 
> I have long thought that one of my key problems with morphs is that it can
> be difficult to affect a particular change to many morphs at once.  With a
> mechanism like this, one could change the border width for all "window"
> morphs to 1 bit, or to a particular color, etc.  I have a long list of other
> features along these lines that are gathering dust at home.  If there is
> interest, I'll try to round 'em up.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> ---==> Chris
> 

---
For the greater the pleasure whereby we are affected,     |  ryan at techno.ca 
the greater is the perfection whereto we pass - Spinoza   |  Ryan Daum