Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!remus.rutgers.edu!declan From: declan@remus.rutgers.edu (Declan McCullagh/LZ) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: NeXTstep 2.0 interesting features... Keywords: dvorak keyboard mapping Message-ID: Date: 13 Dec 90 05:56:01 GMT Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 67 I finally got a chance to sit down with NeXTstep 2.0, and discovered some interesting things. * There doesn't seem to be any equivalent of 1.0's 'blit' program, used in the rc.* scripts during the boot process. Instead, there's /usr/etc/fbshow, which takes as arguments the text displayed in the spinning-disk panel. For instance: fbshow -A -B -E -s 3 "Checking" "System" "Files..." * There's a _very_ nice way of creating icons for directories. Just get a 48 x 48 pixel TIFF file, rename it to ".dir.tiff", and your directory will have that icon in the File Viewer and Digital Librarian. * One minor squabble: one can no longer reorder the various "panels" in Preferences. * Icon is vastly improved, even over the early copies of 2.0 that have been making the rounds. It isn't as stable as Icon 1.0 was, but - hey - it's in ../Demos, after all. There's a TIFF utility (tiffutil) included, which recognizes various forms of compression formats: LZW, PackBits, LZW w/horizontal differencing, and JPEG. Interestingly enough, only Icon seems able to handle JPEG compression - Scene couldn't and neither could the Workspace Manager's Inspector panel. Here's some results for a 640x480 greyscale 8 bits/pixel image: 307374 Dec 12 15:11 Declan.tiff (Uncompressed) 252352 Dec 12 15:00 Declan.LZW.tiff (Compressed with Icon's LZW option) 231821 Dec 12 14:57 Declan.tiff.Z (Compressed with 'compress') 70958 Dec 12 14:55 Declan.JPEG.tiff (Compressed with Icon's JPEG option) And for the same image at 2 bits/pixel: 14869 Dec 12 15:05 Declan.2b.tiff.Z (Compressed w/'compress') 15460 Dec 12 15:01 Declan.2b.LZW.tiff (Compressed w/LZW) 76974 Dec 12 15:05 Declan.2b.tiff (Uncompressed) JPEG image compression only works on an image 4 bits/pixel or higher. * There are four Ensemble files in /NextLibrary/Music/Ensemble. Excellent sounding, too. * In /usr/lib/NextStep/Workspace.app/WorkspaceStrings, there are nine files containing the strings used by the Workspace Manager: "Background processes active. Unmount disk anyway?" = "Background processes active. Eject disk anyway?"; "Do you really want to kill %s?"; "Background processes active. Rename disk anyway?"; And so on. * The online documentation is truly superb. Plus, I've only found about three places (in the Music Kit documentation, I believe) in which the annoying <> phrase popped up. * There are lots of nice features added. Things like including support for banner pages, lots of color icons in /NextDeveloper/Demos, the ability to boot using only a specified amount of memory (say 8 MB on a 16 MB system), and so on. -Declan McCullagh Independent NeXT Developer