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From: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: iconification
Message-ID: <1200@spice.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 19-May-87 02:10:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: spice.1200
Posted: Tue May 19 02:10:39 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 20-May-87 01:35:18 EDT
Reply-To: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 69

Keywords:



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.
>

And Charles Poirier writes (*no*, I don't use standard Usenet
software:)

> 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.

Wait -- stop, hold it a second.  There is a fundamental difference
between the kind of icon that Mr. Witbrock refers to and the standard
Amiga-type icon.

One of the features that X provides is to take the current window and
shrink it down to an iconic representation.  What this allows you to
do is to have many windows active while keeping your "desktop" from
becoming crowded.  The program is still active when iconified, and you
can even talk to it by moving the pointer on top of the icon and
typing.  I find it very useful to be able to tell a window to stop
hogging screen space when I'm not immediately using it.  Running under
X, I juggle a Common Lisp window, an editor, a cshell, and at least
one telnet window.  I generally like to keep only the window I'm using
active on the screen and leave the rest as icons.

A standard Amiga icon, on the other hand, is merely a representation
of an application program's place in the filesystem, and is used to
initially start the program and hand it a few pieces of information.
The X iconification represents a running program, the Workbench icon
represents a file on disk.

The X iconification scheme is already available on the Amiga in at
least one application program -- Matt's DME.  Clicking on the right
button forces a DME window to shrink to a small title-bar style icon.
Clicking on it again snaps the window back to full size.  After using
this scheme, I wish Intuition had supported iconification as one of
its standard features.

What Mr. Witbrock proposes is to retrofit Intuition to support
iconification of *any* application window by installing a PopCLI-type
daemon.  The daemon could look up the currently active window and tell
Intuition to shrink it to an iconic representation.  A similar
procedure would work for the reverse operation.  This is much
different from Charles' idea of turning application screens into
miniature Workbench icons (not an altogether bad idea in itself,
either).

I don't know if such a thing is possible, but if it is I would like to
see it happen.  Maybe this would be a good suggestion for something to
build into 1.3 (CATS, *please* take note).

			--M
-- 

Mike Portuesi / Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department
ARPA:	mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu
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"Amiga hackers do it graphically, with lots of sound effects"

"Mac owners dream in black and white
 Atari owners dream in color...
 but Amigoids dream using Hold and Modify!"