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From: lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Are applications using the Clipboard?
Keywords: IFF, CAT, FTXT, ILBM, Clipboard, Applications.
Message-ID: <2235@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Date: 16 Nov 90 20:21:47 GMT
Lines: 45
Return-Path: <lpami!lphillips>
To: van-bc!rnews

In <1990Nov16.100909.29735@ida.liu.se>, micja@IDA.LiU.SE (Michael Jansson) writes:
>THE QUESTION:
>
>   IS THERE NO APPLICATIONS THAT SUPPORTS THE CLIPBOARD (PROPERLY)????

Not many, if any at all.

>
>I am in the process of writing an application that will use the Clipboard
>device (the device that lets you cut some text/picture/data in one
>application and move to another application where you paste it in).  I
>read the RKRM: Libs&Devs and learned that workbench applications should at
>least use clip-data that is text or image (FTXT or ILBM IFF-chunks) and
>that they should handle the case that the clip-data may consist of several
>representations of the data (a CAT IFF-chunk named CLIP).

In my opinion, the seeming insistence on IFF data format has severely limited
the number of people who are willing to use the clipboard.  Without an IFF
library to call upon, or without a series of systems calls to handle it, who is
going to bother with writing their own IFF parsers into each program just in
case someone else writes one into theirs?

>I started to write my application with this specification and was able to
>cut&paste data within my application. Then I tried to cut&paste data to
>other applications. I started with Notepad (remember? the hoplessly slow
>pseudo editor that supports proportional fonts ;-). Guess what: It
>disliked the data in the clipboard and started to meditate.

Not overly surprising... there is a fairly long history of IFF parsers that do
not handle IFF files well.

>I failed to find other applications that uses the clipboard.

Perhaps we will see more use of the clipboard now that 2.x has an
iffparse.library. Would be nice.

-larry

--
The only things to survive a nuclear war will be cockroaches and IBM PCs.
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|   //   Larry Phillips                                                 |
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