Coexist
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. Popup menu for RealPhoneFor 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.