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From: djohnson@beowulf.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Hooks into the OS vs doing it all yourself (Was Re: Clueless Mac<>)
Message-ID: <16194@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Date: 31 Jan 91 02:09:13 GMT
References: <1991Jan25.075446.716@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <7658@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1991Jan31.011702.12095@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
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In article <1991Jan31.011702.12095@Neon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan J Torrie) writes:
>peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>>In article <1991Jan25.075446.716@Neon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan J Torrie) writes:
>>>   Can your program get its hooks into this event BEFORE the OS gets
>>> hold of it and "do its own thing"?
>
>>Nope. You can tell Intuition the bounds you're willing to let the user manage
>>the window within, but that's it.
>
>  Well this will probably cause some flames, but this is an example of
>where the Mac is MORE customizable than the Amiga... i.e. where the
>user can make things work the way he wants, not the way the OS wants.

OK, the answer given is probably misleading...  The user CAN(!)
tell the OS to do nothing at all with the window - and the program
is responsible for redrawing, etc.  This is much the same way
the Mac does it - so the Mac is not more customizable in this sense.

However, the common case on the Amiga is to let the OS handle redrawing,
which it does by saving occluded portions of the window in memory.  This
takes extra memory, but allows the programmer to not have to worry
about this.

So there are no "approved" hooks into the OS, but you can still handle
your own drawing functions.  This leaves out the possibility of having
the OS redraw the scrollbars, etc, while the program handles redrawing
of its own graphics.  (actually, you could probably use 2 windows or
layers to do this...)  Unapproved hooks are possible by letting the
program peek into the global input stream before Intuition sees it...
-- 
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu
  - Political correctness is Turing undecidable.