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From: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: iconification
Message-ID: <1766@vax135.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-May-87 12:49:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: vax135.1766
Posted: Mon May 18 12:49:43 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 19-May-87 04:38:07 EDT
References: <59@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 30
Summary: Suggested screen-dump hack

In article <59@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu> mjw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Witbrock) writes:
>Hey, I've been using x, and they have this neat thing called an active icon.
>When you iconify a windo, it gets zapped into a really little copy of the
>same window (i.e. shrunk text and graphics), you can even type into it.
>
>I don't see why this shouldnt be done on the amiga, and would be a cute
>cure for over crowded WBs.

I was just thinking about something like this.  Wouldn't it be great to
have a screen-dump program that writes out IFF plus an icon that is a
miniature of the screen?  You would get instant feedback as to what your
files look like.

Of course there is a difference between iconifying text windows and
iconifying color pictures: icons are going to have (typically) only
four colors, but the original will have (typically) 16 to 4096.  So the
shrink program should try to do some clever color remapping from the
picture colors into the workbench palette.  Specifically, do the
shrinking internally in RGB mode to get an average color for all pixels
covered by one icon pixel, THEN map the icon colors into WB color registers.

There would be a problem with different folks using different WB colors,
so sending these icons to your friend's WB will result in odd-looking
colors.  But they would still be semi-legible.

SO!  We need a volunteer to hack this up.  Any takers?
-- 
	Charles Poirier   (decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4,attmail)!vax135!cjp

	"The road to Hell is paved with good opinions."