Windows and Transpointing Arrows [Transcription of Video]


Nelson: This is my fundamental notion of how a computer screen should look. You can have as many windows as you like, and whatever you like on them, but you have transpointing arrows that cross the boundaries of these windows. But people say, well, that's not how God intended windows to be used. Wrong! It's how far they got at Xerox Parc. Ok. The real point is that this is what you need. You need to be able to scroll the windows and have the arrow heads follow the connections where they are. They need not be just narrow arrows, but can link to whole paragraphs or objects. If you have two scrolling windows and some sort of animatable, writhable object, as the object writhes, the pointers should continue to be attached to the parts of the object that are relevant. So this is what I call transpointing.


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