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From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Workbench improvements.. anybody disagree with this evaluation?
Message-ID: <8704292134.AA22507@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 29-Apr-87 17:34:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: cory.8704292134.AA22507
Posted: Wed Apr 29 17:34:10 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 2-May-87 03:03:41 EDT
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>But but but but....we have to admit that the drawer opening speed MUST BE
>IMPROVED ! I'm not too hot on the idea in the first posting, since the
>thing must still muck around in multiple files. Let's get this straight:
>(I know I'm right :-) ) the icons must be cached together to get decent
>performance. If they're still split up the drawer opening time will still
>be dismal. I really am not too concerned with the possibility that doing
>the internal combination of icons might make that *part* of the guts of
>my Amiga OS look *slightly* mac like. Heck, we both use icons and windows, No ?
>Except we have the "advantage" of slow drawer opening.....gosh.... :-).
>If there's one improvement that need to be in 1.3, that's the one !

	Making an icon oriented interface supported at the filesystem level
is simply not feasible... it doesn't solve anything, and makes for big 
compatibility problems (like files are no longer simply files).  The *proper*
way to do it simply to stick all the icons for a given directory in a 
single file.  Since the directory is hash based, this eliminates directory 
searches completely, and allows any optimization in filesystem performance
to be automatically reflected in the speed at which icons come up.  Bringing
up ALL the icons in a window is as easy as reading, say, a 4K file.  If a 
window had, say, about 20 icons in it, you're talking about a 6K file.  How
long does it take to load a 6K file from a floppy???? about a second.

	Q.E.D.  The solution is staring us all in the face.

					-Matt