window sets in OS9

[IIO]

instead of hijacking one of cliff´s projects once more, this time i am opening a new thread for this.

only a very few applications such as logic audio had "window sets" in MacOS 9.

i recently thought that it might be nice to have "window sets" in the finder, too.

so that you can switch between "all i need for programming xyz", "open disk # 5 and #6 to copy many audio files", "show my photoshop folder and the trash" and "all windows closed" by pressing key commands.

eventually such a function should have an option to close all windows before you call a set and only open the set in addition.

what do you think it could be useful for from your own personal perspective, and how do you think it would be possible.

[Daniel]

From a mechanics point of view, such a project would use the Alias Manager and the Apple Event Manager.

The Alias Manager would be used for remembering folders and disks; the Apple Event Manager would be used for interacting with windows, folders, and disks as the Finder sees them.

If AppleScript is good enough at working with Aliases, you could even use it directly.

The hard part is that the way you want to interact with windows is different than what the Finder supports. Major viewpoint translations are very annoying and often require you to consider the edge cases of both points of view.

[IIO]

yes, i was also thinking about using aliases.

the app would just put them in a fixed location relative to the finder (or itself), and in opposite to "real adresses" it had the big benefit that you could even rename and move the originals and the sets would still work.

what i have no clue of is "thread safety" of apple events. if you applescript "close all, open A, open B" and for some reason B was already open, will it work? and what if the user clicks somewhere during the process...?

[OS923]

When you send an Apple event then you have the possibility to disable interaction.

But Daniel is right, this can be done using aliases and Apple events.

Make a folder "Workspaces" in the preferences folder. For every workspace you make here a subfolder that contains an alias to the folders in this set. Then you need something that allows you to pick the right workspace from a menu. This can be an application or an extension or a control strip module or a contextual menu extension, your choice.

[IIO]

wasnt there are third party cdev called "multialias" or similar, which combined multiple alisases into one file, like they did later with folder actions in OSX?
then it almost existed already - of course without the option to position, size, and "view option" each window in a set.

in an ideal case for me it would be in a menubar menu (in the "windows" menu?) and had 10 slots for window sets, just like copypaste one did for clipboards.

in the menubar it is easy to just hack custom keyboard commands into them.

[IIO]

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