WWDC1997 Session 103

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en welcome to session 103 I'm Gordon garbed user experience evangelist first we're going to give you an overview of the user experience roadmap on Mac OS in the second part of this session you'll learn about contextual manager contextual menu manager plugins and Apple data detectors which are a contextual menu manager plugin so please welcome the Mac OS user experience technical lead Arnold Gordo [Applause] my note on my power book my prayer book is waking up there you go so when the Christopher Columbus decided to go west and see what was out there the state of the art in the terms of maps that were available was the map of the world that Romero did in the 1459 and on this method was very interesting map because first of all tremor was pretty certain about what he was describing he thought it you know we knew the world as it was and on his map you can see that first of all the oceans cover only 10% of the of the earth which we later learn is not quite accurate and of course the Americas wasn't on his word on his map either because you know we didn't know about them but it was pretty sure that it was a projector instead of the world so I want to talk to you about the roadmap of what we want to do in the in terms of user experience and much like Romero you know I unlike him whether I know that what I'm going to tell you is not necessary 100 percent agree that things can change and you know that we don't let you know everything that's going to happen in our industry which is pretty dynamic and difficult to predict what's going to happen in 12 years but I'm going to try to give you an idea of where we've been and where we going a lot of things that we've been talking about for the past years at the different types of leader businesses I actually have been following this road map and as you can see we've been pretty consistent in terms of what we want you to do in terms of user experience of course few things that change in terms of fulfilling with us but you know we consider that to be what's going on endure and we care less about that it does not affect really the direction as follow for the user experience so those are the categories that that we're going to be looking at system management desktop management information access customization assistance and help if you were there at produce WWC you remember this thing that's basically what what we talked about before and again you know we're going to go over along the same directions one thing that importance you said before I go into more detail better what we've been doing with system76 with the Mac website and with video systems one thing that's really important important that has to do with us obviously import it's part of the user experience it's not only new to have nice features and have a finder that's easy to use and so on of course that's very important but even more important is to have a system that's actually reliable you know if your machine crash crashes every five minutes well that's not a very good user experience if your machine is not responsive if it's too slow that's not a very good user experience either so performance and stability are two very key components of what the delivering the total user experience once you have that then you can start working on delivering some more advanced features and that's what I'm going to be talking about now so you can see on this slide in green the different things that we've been doing with harmony we've introduced a new expansion manager which is helping a lot managing different extensions and control panels and so on as well as a new installer those were the kind of the two main features and 76 in addition to the other ones related to performance and stability improvements obviously there is also Apple information access tool to the SDK that's available to seedings and some of you have have been using it and of course I will guide which we delivered with the 2007 five now in Temple we'll be introducing some more features we'll have new versions of the upgrader we can make some improvements to your hard disk layout we have some set of assistance I'm going to talk about this and the normal defender in a while a lot of things in the area of disturb management obviously some things in information access contextual menus and ADT which we're going to talk about some more in this session and it minutes appearance we do at a session that talked about the different thing that we are doing in terms of including the toolbox and improving the overall appearance of Mac OS and it's different and help and again the worst things that we've been doing that you'll be able to see in Mac OS 8 and those are some of the future directions I'm not going to talk a lot about this because again you know things change and it's difficult to predict exactly what we'll be doing but I'd like to give you an idea of the things that we are interested in and I'm going to go talk about this some more when I will go on the next slide first of all in the area of system management at the Commerce session we talked about the CGI trademark resource there's another resource also that's important you know that is the HIV are minus 56 96 resource CGI trademark was introduced in 2006 the HF grv sauce was introduced with 77 actually but not all applications take advantage of it and we believe that it's something that's very simple to do it's just a resource to add to your application or to your to the extensions that you create and so on but it's very useful because you can provide some information to end-users about you know what is this thing in my extension folder why would I want that what does it do CGI trademark is more useful for the extension manager and provide more length information and you can find information about how to do that in your application in the tech node that's using the newest numbering scheme is TN 109 one and you can find that on the dev world that website is the it's called the extension major tech node in case it gets me numbered between now and the time we look at it we've made some change changes to the how display ad you know very uh the more we add things that not necessarily with a very well-defined plan things start to get a little complicated and messy so we try to clean up things for in order to do that in Mac OS 8 we're going to introduce a number of new folders seek a Haunter this the chorus searchin changes the session will have new point photos selectors the tempo tech note will detail that will explain what those folders are for what the selectors are for how can you how you can use that to help with the setup of the system as well we'll have the to assistant and the tempo Mac OS 8 one that will help up help with setting up your system in general setting up things like you know date and time and wise your name and so on and another one that will help customers get on the internet set up your IP configurations find a nice P if you need to find one and so on this is something that also there is an opportunity for you to take advantage of that in your applications and we do have an article in developed number 27 that details how you can do that it gives some sample that that had to do that and that explains as well the user interface guidelines that you can follow to make them work well in the area of disturb management obviously a lot of changes with Mac OS 8 you've seen some of the demos this morning and this afternoon a lot of things have changed there are some important things also that will be detailed in the tempo release note when we put it out about some new Apple events that your application will be sent we've made some changes also in the way drag and drop works so that you can drag and drop information between your applications and the finder more easily and more logically than it did it doesn't it does right now and in the future there are some other advances that we want to do obviously we did not have time to do everything we wanted in the Mac website for example Mike website still uses the find file 2007 six there are some improvements that would like to make in this area there are some improvement that we like to make as well in the area of integration of the Internet to the desktop there are a lot of simple things that we could do that we think would have a lot of values and we're looking into into those and hopefully we'll be able to deliver them in soon in a system in the system release so we think there is still a lot of room for improvement and I'm sure that once you'll be having an opportunity to play with the finder 8.0 you'll also give us some feedback about what kind of things you'd like to see in it it's by no way a finished worker still a lot of things to do in the area of information access also we've talked about this for a while and there's a number of things that we've done Apple information access toolkit which we use the codename v-twin for it before it is now available as the NHD k4u developers we want to take advantage of it we have a session at the WGC session 104 that will discuss how to use the api's and also how you can get in touch so that you can get seated with it and use it in your product so if you're interested in it you're welcome to attend this session contextual menus and Apple data detectors in section 102 we talked about how your applications could use contextual menus in this session we're going to talk about how you can write connect for many plugins and expand the capabilities of the finder for example or external capabilities of other applications that will use contextual menus as well and we'll also be talking about Apple data detectors which are a great way it's a kind of connection plug-in it's a great way to extend the capability of contextual menus by doing very powerful text searches very easily for you and they will explain to you extend that unit in a while let me go back to the slide another thing that I didn't mention there in that we're looking in terms of things that we want to do in the future we want to provide access to the content of documents when you do search it and so on and that's something that we'll be looking at incorporating in the finder in the future so the old users can take advantage of it another thing that we'll be looking at as well is navigation services which we talked about at previous conferences it's not part of micro site yet but this is still something that we're working on that we'd like to deliver eventually we don't have a specific plans to tell you right now but I it's important that you should know that it's one of the direction that we're looking at appearance one oh we are talking about we're totally in the session 102 we're just before here that will be repeated on Friday as well if you can understand it the in terms of the changes that we're doing both the end-user level the appearance is visual visibly different but also at the toolbox level and again there are many more things that we want to do some improvements to the toolbox to make it easier for you to use we don't really want to make huge changes that you know will require you to record your entire application that's not what we're trying to do on Mac OS we want to do small improvements that can have the most value for you and another thing that they will be looking at obviously is a team switching which will allow users to select different kind of clearances and again that's something that will be coming out later in the area of assistance the Apple guide obviously has been here for for a long time we have mentioned before we also introducing assistance in in tempo and if you have been using Apple yet is something important for you to know is that we have a much improved tool that you're going to be able to use it's called the Apple guide visual authoring authoring tool also known as AG that it will be compatible with editing source files so you don't have to start from scratch you can import existing source files and it's going to generate output that's compatible with with the so side that you may have today the compiler speed has been much improved so the process of compiling an entire database is much more much more it's much better than it used to be and there are a number of features also that make localization easier again that's that have to do with the process of repetitively making changes for the days as the original version changes letting the localized versions tend staying but there are a lot of features and printer views that will make that easier it's going to be a series starting in June 97 and you'll be able to have a look at it and use it it's a much more graphical tool instead of having lines of code as you and see maybe I'm from on the on the slide here what you have on the left-hand side is kind of you know you had with the existing tools you have to use a biblical programming language to describe what you want to do with AG that you'll be able to have something that's much more graphical here as you can see your representation of the access window and you can type in directly the different topic areas and so on so much more direct manipulation so it's a very nice tool so I just wanted to give you an idea of the kind of directions that we're going towards we'll have also a feedback form for the fine-grained user experience later this week and I invite you to come here that gravities forum and ask us the questions that you may have and the directions that you would like us to go towards and at this point I'd like to ask well just in time I'd like to have unfinished guys felt guys follow time to talk about contextual menu plugins thank you very much I could have introduced myself if you want to be too but all right so for those of you who are here at the previous session about appearance you learned that you could add contextual menus to your applications um this is all well and good but you may have some other ideas of items that could be added to other applications contextual menus so to that end we allow plug-ins to the contextual menu manager what these plugins are are PowerPC only standalone code modules based on Psalm that allow your plugin to modify other applications contextual menus by looking at what was clicked on in the given application so in the graphic you can see that the application commands have to do with text the contextual menu manager also adds some help commands at the top and plugins have added several other commands since they can sense that the user clicked on text now I'd like to give you a demo of what life is like with and without contextual many plugins on this machine we have a stock tempo with no contextual ranges so if I bring up a contextual menu on say a folder in the finder I have all the finders standard commands that should be on a contextual menu now if I move to this other machine and second as I need the second machine thank you okay if I move to this other machine and bring up the contextual menu in the finder plugins have been able to determine several things the finder passes object specifiers for the contextual menu manager to let it know what the user clicked upon in this case it's passing an object specifier for a folder that folder name is able to be coerced into text so a plugin offers to speak it and another plugin realizes that hey there's an FF spec here so I can compress it if I want to this isn't just in the finder other applications that Rev can give additional content so if I bring up a contextual menu it's in fact here again I have speak but other plugins might be more intelligent about what kind of text they act upon data detectors in this case is able to see a few different items in the text and offers additional command on the contextual menu but they will show you more about that a little bit later on [Applause] so how do you go about making a contextual menu plug-in it's pretty easy since there's some objects you just derive from the base class which is the abstract cm plug-in class there are only four methods to override it's pretty straightforward not real tough the first method is the initialize method this gets called when the contextual menu manager starts up gives your plug-in a chance to do anything it might need in initialization time you're passed and FS spec that points to your plug-in in case you need to grab resources or do other stuff try to keep in mind that your plug-in is going to live for the life of the boot so don't go allocating 3 megabyte buffers that would be bad now here's the probably the most crucial method the examine context method this gets called immediately before the contextual menu is about to display so this gets called actually for every contextual menu click the contextual menu manager passes an Apple event descriptor to the plug-in this Apple event descriptor is the exact same descriptor that the application passes the contextual menu manager based on this descriptor your plug-in can add items to the contextual menu now you don't actually modify the menu directly instead the contextual menu manager gives you an Apple event descriptor list which your plugin fills up with the script of records that describe the commands you want in this case here you can see that every record has a name which is going to get a text that's displayed in the menu and a unique command ID that will be returned to your plugin if the user chooses your command item so this is great but you saw Apple data detectors added sub menus well you can do that too you just add a new key to your command record and in that key you specify another descriptor list with more descriptive record commands pretty straightforward you can nest down to the limits of the menu manager which I believe is five levels now one of the key design goals for Mac OS 8 was to make it fast so that this end we don't want contextual menus to take 2 or 3 seconds before they display your plug-ins are passed a time limit that they are allowed to well it's actually the plugins responsibility to respect this time on it but the contextual menu manager gives them a time slice and they're allowed to do as much processing as they can with an timeslice to determine what items they can cannot add to the contextual menu when an item is actually chosen from your contextual menu your plugins handle selection method is called you're given the same Apple event descriptor so you can go ahead and apply your command to that descriptor and you're also passed the unique command ID that your plugin associated with the command that it put in the contextual menu after the contextual menu is displayed we've got a fourth method that's called post menu cleanup it's there so your plugin has a chance to undo anything it did if it if it happened to allocate a buffer in its examine context method it should dispose of it in post menu cleanup something to keep in mind post menu cleanup is called for your plugin regardless of whether or not your plugins command was chosen so there's one bug that we found and a workaround that you can use to deal with it the contextual menu manager instantiates your psalm object plug-in by name unfortunately some doesn't know about that name before the contextual menu manager connects to your plugin shared library so it's your plugins responsibility to register its name it's actually very simple in your code fragment initialization routine you can instantiate one of your plugin and immediately delete it that's good enough and the contextual menu manager can do the rest so once you have your plugin you need to make it available to users they have to have a special file type C MPI and it has to live in the contextual menu item subfolder of the system folder under Mac OS 8 it's Auto routed you don't need to worry about that and we have a fine folder selector in case some application might need to use it the third piece of information that you'll need is an extended C FRG resource this specifies that yes you are a psalm object specifies your class name and it specifies what your subclasses so that the contextual menu manager can find you so plugins allow all kinds of great opportunities for developers any application that passes descriptor data to the contextual menu manager can be enhanced by a plugin as you can see there's plenty of opportunities in the finder you can tour their stuff in two FS specs and I'll other cool data types as you can see there's plenty of other ways you can go about adding items to the contextual menu we realize that one of the cooler aspects of contextual menu managers has to do with clicking on text there's all kinds of cool things you could decide to do based on text so what we did is we wrote Apple data detectors which is a contextual menu plug-in that looks at text analyzes it sees if it finds anything important and then carries out actions so we've spent our taking the effort ourselves to make the text processing engine work so that you can just write plugins to Apple data detectors that leverage that to make your lives a little bit simpler so now here's the guy that wishes I probably spent a little bit more time on Apple data detectives than I actually did he's going to explain it a little in a little bit more detail they write Apple data detectors intelligent integration what do we mean by that well intelligent because like I said Apple data detectors takes the simple data type text and find meaningful bits of semantic data that used to be ignored and all of a sudden turns them into something that the ughter user youtr can operate on integration because the contextual menu manager provides this service right in a context that the user is already in today when you leave you'll understand the benefits that Apple data detectors provides to the users and to you as developers you'll understand an overview of how all the software works together and you'll find out how easy it is to extend what Apple data detectors finds and how to extend what it does with what it finds the benefits what are the benefits to the user well we started with the user a little while back in Apple's advanced technology group a user study was conducted we asked users how does the Mac OS measure up as far as user helping users like put data away get it back in files the users expressed that it did fine there were no problems with that in a surprising result was that the Mac OS did not help enough in letting the user move data back and forth it offered no assistance in handling the data there was lots of data in the documents that the Mac OS just let the user have to deal with through many steps and it would be great if the computer could help so that was the launch of the project Apple data detectors after it we worked the kinks out in Apple's advanced technology group it was transferred to the OS Technology Group where it was productized and is on the verge of being available to end-users and to you at this time I'd like to show you a demo of what the end-users experiences with Apple data detectors this is a document and in it I type the email address a URL on an FTP site so the user experience involves selecting the text control clicking and Apple data detectors after receiving the text from the contextual menu manager populates the contextual menu with actions that could be taken on the different data that was found so here's my email address and if you're if you use klaris email or you could simply select this and instead of cutting pasting finding claireaussi mailer and then pasting in the text i'm immediately ready to send myself an email another example is the URL instead of again cutting pasting launching netscape i'm have immediate access to it by simply selecting one item off the contextual menu how that is the simple yet integrated user experience that Apple data detectors provides the configuration aspect of Apple data detectors involves a control panel where the user can further test ok well this is not what it looks like at home sorry well sorry this says email address so what oh push ups I was last year email it this is the email address detector currently it has Apple email address detector installed with a list of actions and the user can say well I don't use americon line or cyber dog I use clarity mailer so this is the mailer that I would leave running to work with when I use it so a guy explained a little bit about how these pieces are working together basically the users in front of the client application the client application passes the selection off of the spell checker and file stuff are going to get a chance to look at it and so as a plugin that's going to pass the text to Apple data detectors and then based on the detectors and the actions it installed the extension will populate the contextual menu and if the user selects an item the action will be executed as you saw also the user can configure what they want through the control panel which again talks to the Apple data detectors extension extending what Apple data detectors finds is really easy I don't know how many of you follow the CS course but if you have you might remember compilers class and this great book the dragon books yeah a lot of the technology is coming pretty much out of this book I mean we took regular expressions and applied them to a meaningful user experience other concepts involved their parsers parse trees and ambiguity and if any of you remember what amber videos you're far along so what we did is we took the regular expression language beefed it up a little bit and turned it into a Mac OS technology this is an example this example is my holiday would be the detector name following that is a description string that shows up in the control panel if the user selects good detector and then this detector would find the exact string July 4 so starting with how to write the detection rules the most simple type of expression are what I call atomic expressions hydrogen and neutron expressions will be made available later but for right now we only have atomic expressions and they okay my roommate said you wouldn't get it so for atomic expressions we have character set and character sequence in a character set and if any one of the characters are detected the expression evaluates to true and for a character sequence all the characters must be found in the order specified going a little more complex compound expressions are our expressions that contain the Tomic expressions or other compound expressions again there's the set sequence idea for a set if any of the expressions evaluates to true the expression evaluates to true and for a sequence all expressions must evaluate to true in the order declared for that expression to be evaluated to true and in the definition of a detector it can make reference to another detectors definition we call these detector references so in this case date is making use of the definitions for day of week and month in its own definition a powerful part of regular expressions is their ability to express repeating and optional patterns these symbols in our language lets you do that this comes straight out of the Dragon book asterisk plus and question mark letting me represent repeating or optional patterns for the detector this sequence of examples goes from very specific to very generalized way of expressing date the first example will find exactly April 5th 1995 the next one generalizes the to January and February by indicating an expression set of character sequences January and February in the next example I generalized the day and you feel closely this example will find the day 0 through 39 so it needs a little more work to find 1 through 31 in the next example we took the definition for month out put it in its own detector and referred to it with the name month we also generalized the year to find any year in the 1990 decade and in the last example we took all the definitions out gave them their own names and refer to them by their name in the definition and made your optional data detectors is more than just a recognition engine its parser - and if you put labels in front of the sub detectors in a detectors definition those labels will be useful in the action and the action can refer to them when it's dealing with the data so in this case email address is making available the sub detected text for user and host with the labels of the user and the host well with Apple and all of you

• finding so many detectors it was going

to be a wonder that we wouldn't all clobber each other so every detector file has its own namespace and you don't have to worry about other developers writing other detectors with the exact same name but there is a global namespace if you want to cooperate with one another a registry is underway and hopefully will be available a little later all of apples detectors are currently exported to the global namespace and you can use them the way that you put a detector in the global namespace is by placing a caret after the detector name and the way you refer to a detector in the global namespace is by placing a caret after the detector name on the right side of the definition undoubtedly in your detector files you'll be writing more detectors than you'd ever want the user to see like alpha and digit and they don't really care about those so the ones that you do want the user to see in the control panel you place an exclamation point after the detector name I pick that and I don't know why it's just meant see it so other ways that the detectors show up in the control panel is by if an action attaches to a detector then it will automatically be displayed in the control panel for the user's configuration customisable detectors besides data types that can be expressed by patterns there are simple lists of strings that are specific types of data that users have in their own context and data detectors should be aware of them these include things like conference rooms restaurants people and other detectors can make use of them so for example if you wrote a meeting detector it could make reference to the conference room detector now the meeting detector would contain detectors like dates and times which are pattern detectors and then perhaps a conference room detector which the user can populate with conference rooms in their own building the way that you specify a customizable detector is by placing a pound sign after the detector name and then making the definition of the specific format an expression set of character sequences so in this example the expression set contains the character sequences calm and dotnet and I'd like to show you where in the control panel the user can add to your customizable detectors I have to bring this broken thing up again in the file menu if they go to the show customizable detectors Apple is initially shipping to customizable detectors Apple hosts domain and Apple news category instead of specifying every single country as a part of a host we picked the normal endings and a few other countries the user can come here and specify other countries that we did not include as part of the host suffix and add it and then email addresses and HTTP URLs and hosts will make use of the new definition to detect more data guidelines I only have one guideline that I can remember back from class and that I've actually seen the very mean to the Apple data detectors engine and it's ambiguity in this example the pattern looks for a through D followed by or 0 or more times followed by a period a through Z zero or more times so for this first example if on the input string there's a capital B does it go in the first expression or the second you could say either and you would be right and this is called ambiguity and this is Apple data detectors worst enemy for performance so while you're writing detectors you need to avoid ambiguity as much as possible in this example what I really meant to say was a through D followed by any number of period a through these so I took the period out and that's specifically separating the A through D and a through Z expressions this is my one guideline to you to help Apple data detectors perform as well as possible well beyond regular expressions I did learn how to use a chart parser at Apple and that is also in the engine depending on the complexity of your detectors a deterministic finite automata can be built from your regular expression this makes the engine very zippy but if you decide to write a detector that is just a little too complex that there's not enough memory or time to construct the deterministic finite automata the chart parser is used now the chart parser is pretty hungry when it comes to memory and time but we try to offload as much as we can to the deterministic finite automata so for example let's say that the email address detector was so complex that it simply could not be turned into a DFA but the user detector and the host detector were simple enough that we could well then the DFA for the user and the host detector will be used and the chart parser will be used to tie them together and as long as there's no ambiguity between the host and the user detector the engine will perform just fine how many of you remember that from how's class books extending what Apple data detectors does with what it finds is just as easy we're using an already known technology Apple script so what is an Apple data detectors action it's an Apple script script an Apple script applet or an Apple event aware application and these are not this does not mean your application these are applications that live specifically in the Apple data detectors folder in the actions folder of the Apple David Tutera the system folder so they the action requires a resource and that it responds to a specific Apple event the resource tells data detectors which detector it would like to support which strings should be put into the contextual menu and if you'd like a description string that can be shown in the control panel we chose the text resource one one to eight and here's an example of the format this action would be saying that it would like to support the email address detector in the Apple namespace or the Apple detector file it wants send email with clarity mailer to be displayed in the contextual menu and it would like this string shown in the control panel when the user clicks on the action in the control panel why did we pick a text resource with a positive number this is the exact same text resource that Apple script scripts use for their descriptions when displayed in the Apple script script editor how many times can i say script why did we do this for discoverability we found while people were test developing actions that they would often duplicate an action the hidden resources underneath were unknown to them and they simply could not get the action to support the detector that they wanted to support or they could not change the contextual menu the string displayed so it was chosen for discoverability of reasons and also so that you so that Apple scripts savvy users only have used the script editor and not also res edit when developing Apple the data detector actions this is the Apple event that your action must respond to it's called handle detected data when the appropriate scripting Edition is which will be available during the SDK for some of you you know what it looks like if the scripting Edition isn't there what's passed to the action is an apple event record there are many fields in that record that you can use in this example this action is making use of the detected text field to get all of the text that was found for this in this case an email address and it places it in another apple event record to be sent off to klaris emailer to create a new message as I said before Apple data detectors is more than a recognizer it's also a parser and in this case the field to get to those sub detected parts is the parse tree this it looks like the detected data coming in here as a meeting and the action is trying to get to the sub detected field called start date well when I first started writing detector files myself for Apple data detectors I spent a half hour looking for a comma that was supposed to be somewhere and all data detectors would tell me that the file was invalid well to prevent you from that headache we're going to be providing you with a tool that does syntax checking and based on some feedback from a contractor that we hired to write detectors we also have some pretty other cool features that will help you test the results of your detectors and easily view how they work with each other what can you do to start well as you can see this technology is pretty simple and yet for the user experience is pretty powerful well it takes it beyond being simple and powerful is the content that Apple and you provide to the end user so the way to start is to adopt the contextual menu for now we've included an enabler that will help your app along by using the clipboard but we plan on phasing this out and your app needs to quickly adopt a contextual menu to get the user access to the amazing services that can be made available in the context that they're in and if your application is not scriptable this is an excellent reason and time to make it scriptable even if you don't plan on writing Apple data detectors actions other people can make use of your application if it's scriptable we have our wish list for detectors that we didn't have time to ride and this is just a short list and the most surprising one I think for me was the chemical symbols when we show this technology to a certain company we found out that they represented chemical symbols in text those things are obviously not live objects but Apple David detectors is able to make them so and then the action is to show them drawn in the molecular form in an application that does that but other ones that are just as needed our phone numbers dates times meeting mailing addresses and whatever you can think of that we didn't and I know there's a lot and then of course writing actions that operate on these different types of data Apple data detectors is a great example of how much Apple wants to continue innovation and improve the user experience this is a step towards making the user experience even more task centered instead of step or tool centered again I told you what intelligent integration means and one our way but we need the content which is why we're so committed to cooperating and working with you to make sure that this technology can grow and help the user the way to stay in touch is through this webpage and also through our evangelist Gordon Gard we really appreciate your feedback we recently held a kitchen and we grabbed great feedback that's already been put on a feature list for future versions so at this time we are going to have QA so I'd like to invite Gordon and other members of the panel to come on stage [Applause] you listen to us we'll listen to you now I know there are three mics in this room from the previous sessions I promise not to miss the the center mic please limit yourself to one question at a time and this time I'll start with the center mine Tom Pittman itty-bitty computers I might complain a little bit about your promoting like competitors book I wrote a compiler book although prentice-hall that's okay the dragon book sells more than mine does the question has to do with your date detection if people are writing regular expressions to detect a date they are going to break far more often than people are going to be happy with I hope you're going to do something better than that a future we have written a few date examples back at Apple and distributed them they actually don't break more than they should but another feedback that we got was it would be great if Apple data detector supported programmable detectors perhaps that would be an example for that Linda Fowler with aus text I've written some QuickTime components or actually they're using the component manager but they're not really for QuickTime but my question is the extensions manager currently does not recognize them at all they don't show up in the extensions manager and the resources you were talking about the CCI resources in H SDR and so forth is that going to be supported for the thng components in Mac OS 8 like I said right now it's they don't they don't even show up so so the a shipyard resource is definitely supported if you double taken a quick gun component the balloon that the finder will display will be this distension TR resource of its program the white people just display a standard message that's not very very informative extension metric currently does not display session geez and the reason for that is because they are not things that act at startup turning them on and off is not an effector or your startup sequence in any way however this is something that we're looking at whether we should or should not display a church and geez there are the kind of fires also that are not really all of the startup sequence but I don't look at this isn't folder so we're not changing that for Mac website but we're looking at it see if it makes sense for photo subversion NAT McCauley klaris I have a question about world script support in these contextual menus and in the data detectors I didn't notice any script information being passed when you're passing this text information to and from the various thing so if I wrote an extension to a menu that had Japanese text in and I want to be able to tell whoever it is to display the menu extension in Japanese but it doesn't look like there's any support for that is there yeah there actually is from the contextual menu side of things every command Apple event record the text that you want displayed in the contextual menu is actually supposed to be an int el text type so you can specify script information and I make sure to pass that on to the menu manager when I display the string or when I add the string to the menu so it will display correctly and for the context for the day a detector part of the API is at the same type of text just in case I understand your question when the apple pie application passes text to the contextual menu manager which gets passed on to the plugins the most common data type I'm so far seeing a styled text which that means if the user selection is containing style text which contain script information I can get the International I convert it to Unicode at that point and then again yeah by passing back the information guys that I'm allowed to also display international strings in the contextual menu another thing that's that reminds me that we haven't talked about in previous sessions but that what other changes that we've made for Mac OS 8 is actually that the menu manager now support scripted codes you can specify different scripts couple different menu items and in one given menu so that's architecture then you can do that looks like this is the last question Levi Brown semantics I'm gonna question about the extensions manager right now if I understand correctly the sets are defined as as just single set and if you have a set you can modify it and that's it and if you have a set that extends from another set if the previous set changes none of the changes were propagated what I would like to see or I hope other people like to see is two would be an object-oriented set structure so you could have a base set that would then you can inherit sets off of that and if the base that changed all children sets then change to okay makes sense yes that's an interesting idea we obviously we won't have time to do that for my class a isn't good but that's an interesting idea we're looking to it there are many changes the mini improvement that's we still want to do to extension manager so thanks for the suggestion sure okay we do have one more question over here he reminded me of a question under suggest for the extensions manager um I know use the verge to resource for get your package information and that's great it'd be nice to be able more flexible not too there's another fine a new resource or something like that so we could package things together intelligently instead of relying on the version 2 resource which may not always want to do just suggestion yeah that's something that's been the thought of that the reason why we use the verse to resource are just is because it's already they're sort of used by many applications and software packages but we're thinking about having another specific resource optionally that could be used ok thank you very much I want to encourage everyone to attend the session tomorrow morning at 9:50 on the Apple information access toolkit that's the third in our use Experion sessions this session and the preceding one will also be repeated on fridays you got it got here late and want to want to catch what you missed otherwise thank you very much of a great conference [Applause]