Re: Let's hope XP doesn't keep this "one-up" on OS X!
Re: Let's hope XP doesn't keep this "one-up" on OS X!
- Subject: Re: Let's hope XP doesn't keep this "one-up" on OS X!
- From: Ryan Dary <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 12:46:31 -0700
Good work... identifying the possible hang-ups is the first step to
solving the problem. "All great things were at one time impossible" is
an incredible quote and a personal favorite of mine. While there may be
some difficulties pulling it off, I think that it is worth doing. If
anyone else feels the way I do, then it would be appropriate to send a
feedback to Apple on this issue, don't assume that my feedback will
persuade them; it will take many comments from many people to let Apple
know this is desired.
At least I think it is clear now that this is something Apple would have
to do. It doesn't seem like an opportunity for third party developers...
- Ryan
On Thursday, July 5, 2001, at 10:06 AM, email@hidden wrote:
While it wouldn't be too hard to keep apps running after a user logs
out,
there a whole bunch of issues that arise when running another user.
Firstly, the window server would need mods to make sure that it only
display
windows that belonged to apps being run by the currently logged in user.
This wouldn't be too hard, since all the windows are double buffered, so
apps could update their buffer in the background without any ill
effects on
screen.
There would also have to be quite a bit of work done in dealing with
running
multiple instances of the same app. Example: user A has Mail running,
and
the computer switches over to user B. User B also starts up Mail, and
then
runs an Applescript that sends events to Mail. Which copy of Mail? All
the
IPC stuff would have to be updated to deal with this, along with the
process
manager, etc.
I believe that there would be some issues with resource-fork apps, since
the
resource fork of the app needs to be open when the app is running but
can't
be opened twice, so one copy can't be used to run multiple instances of
the
app. Not to mention the nastiness that would occur if two instances of
Classic were started up at the same time. Ugh!
BTW, it's not clear to me from the descriptions I can find whether or
not
apps under XP actually keep running in the background, or whether their
execution is suspended. I'm pretty sure it's the former, but I just
can't
find any explicit confirmation of this.
--
Brian Webster
email@hidden