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From: ollef@sics.se (Olle Furberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Idling in pre-2.0 HC
Message-ID: <1991Jan10.214108.8066@sics.se>
Date: 10 Jan 91 21:41:08 GMT
References: <1991Jan10.142922.11037@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Sender: news@sics.se
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
Lines: 50

In <1991Jan10.142922.11037@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> mike@pyrite.SOM.CWRU.Edu (Michael Kerner) writes:
 
>AAAAAAugh!

  Ta det lungt. Ta en TOY!

>Howdy, folks, I have a slight little problem I'm trying to work on:
>I want to run something similar to a screen saver (actually, the idea is
>similar - if HC is idle for so long I want to do something).

  As I understand it you must *pass* the idle to all other sort of scripts
and especially to HyperCard itself. 

  The idea of a "screen saver" written in HyperTalk is doomed to failure:
as soon you get a dialog (like ask or answer), you could in no way dispose
it through HyperTalk. It could be argued that it should be built in into
HC some sort of "TimeForSomethingCompletelyDifferent"-message (together 
with a global property "EnoughTime"), but I will not do it here.

  My primitive solution is to look if the user changes the location
of the mouse, and stores the mouselocation and the ticks into a
global variable. I update this variable for every keydown or change in
mouselocation. It's a small script and looks like this:


on idle
  global theidle
  get theidle
  delete last item of it
  if the mouseloc is it then
    if (the ticks - the last item of theidle > 100) then
      answer "Get back to work!"
      put the mouseloc & "," & the ticks into theidle
    end if
  else
    put the mouseloc &"," &the ticks into theidle
  end if
  pass idle
end idle

on keydown
  global theidle
  put the ticks into last item of theidle
  pass keydown
end keydown




   /Olle