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From: kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Hooks into the OS vs doing it all yourself (Was Re: Clueless Mac<>)
Message-ID: <1033@swrinde.nde.swri.edu>
Date: 31 Jan 91 15:30:26 GMT
References: <7658@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1991Jan31.011702.12095@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <1991Jan31.044116.25645@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
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In article <1991Jan31.044116.25645@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) writes:
>In article <1991Jan31.011702.12095@Neon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan J Torrie) writes:
>>
>>  Can you have callback functions.. i.e. get Intuition to call your
>>function while it's moving the knob?
>
[...]
>calls to other tasks. Hard? No. Not as easy as call back, but any 
>fairly good Amiga programmer can emulate them with an input handler
>in a few hours. My question would be, why? I like the message system
>better.

I like the current messaging system better than callbacks also. It does
provide more control over the situation, though callbacks certainly
offer a simpler mechanism. As to tracking a moving knob, that's now a
cinch with GadTools, and it doesn't take a few hours anymore. More like
about 5 minutes from the time you finish reading the documentation.

Unsolicited Testimonial:
I now can knock out a complete gadget interface for one of my filter processes 
in an afternoon instead of a couple of days like it used to take - even with
PowerWindows (always wasted an afternoon changing the PowerWindows source file).
Just about every aspect of handling simple gadgets has been made almost trivial
since I started using GadTools.

I can now:
- Programatically create gadgets based on a variety of parameters (simply too
much trouble before GadTools).
- Ghost and link gadgets through a simple GT_SetGadgetAttrs() call to the
specified gadgets.
- Modify groups of related gadgets to represent, say, an array of structures
where the array element is defined by a cycle gadget - extremely easily.

I won't even bother to explain how easy it is to deal with sliders now.

Yep, I can even track those sliders while I have > 65 tasks, including
23 CLI processes running. It's a busy machine, and I can still edit
source code and 'rn' while all this is going on.

The short of it is that now my multi-process, multi-sample, event-oriented
data acquisition system (phew!) now has window/gadget interfaces for many of
the processes, with more to come.

Thanks Peter, et al.

-------------------------------------------------
BTW, Kim DeVaughn, while updating Sksh, can you please remove the 20 CLI limit
on the process status listing? (How are things going?)

Thanks
Kent Polk: Southwest Research Institute (512) 522-2882
Internet : kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu
UUCP     : $ {cs.utexas.edu, gatech!petro, sun!texsun}!swrinde!kent