Coexist with other desktop applications
where it benefits the user
RealThings run on existing desktops along
with native applications. For the most part they use replacement approaches
for traditional window borders, titles, borders, and menu bars. But users
might expect them to behave in some ways like other applications.
For example,
Windows 95 applications provide a pop-up menu. For the RealPhone we chose
to provide a pop-up menu to support moving and sizing using the keyboard,
and for Close. We also added a Always on Top choice, and supported minimize
for users who want to use the Windows 95 Task Bar. We considered using
a visual control for Close, something like a power switch, but we decided
to use the standard desktop pop-menu in this case.
The remaining RealThings are written in Java so we decided to avoid using platform specific interfaces. Some interfaces, like cut and paste and drag/drop, are fairly common across platforms and should be considered so that RealThings can interact in useful ways with other objects. We plan to explore drag/drop between RealThings and between RealThings and other objects in the future.