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From: john13@garfield.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Intuition's "dont mess with these" fields...
Message-ID: <4201@garfield.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Nov-87 09:04:38 EST
Article-I.D.: garfield.4201
Posted: Tue Nov 10 09:04:38 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Nov-87 05:56:17 EST
References: <1961@amiga.amiga.UUCP> <1825@cadovax.UUCP>
Reply-To: john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell)
Distribution: na
Organization: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Lines: 46
Keywords: Intuition verboten nopokenzefields

In article <305@gethen.UUCP> farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren) writes:
>In article <1846@cadovax.UUCP> keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle) writes:
>
>>Well, I suppose I could just have told everyone that it's an Intuition
>>"bug" that when you go to 364x220 (or whatever) that you're still stuck
>>with a 320x200 mouse area.  But that wouldn't be very supportive of my
>>customer, me passing the buck like that now would it?
>
>No, but it would be a lot more honest.  Better yet, don't talk in terms
>of Intuition "bugs" to the customer at all.  Just tell her that the
>mouse is limited to the 320x200 area, and provide other means of doing
>what you mean to do.  

If you can do it in this release (which all theorizing aside will probably be
the Intuition/Graphics standard release for a _long_ time to come), and it
doesn't break 1.2 software, and we assume that version X.Y will make the
problem a non-issue by making the mouse movable anywhere within the screen
limits, why not limit the "hack" portion by putting in a switch which would
either test the Rev # or be settable by the user, as to whether they wanted
you to mess with the fields?

Phrased something like "this feature of my program is not directly supported
by Intuition V1.2. Disable/enable mouse movement beyond normal screen
dimensions?".

So the situations go like:
	- this issue never gets addressed, your program works forever
	- this issue is resolved in 2.1 or whatever, and you stop messing
	  with the fields
	- 2.1 still doesn't support it, and your hack breaks, so the user
	  has the choice of using 1.2 or disabling the feature. The program
	  may be 5 or 10% less useful, but so will everyone else's overscan
	  programs and yours is the most flexible (so everyone buys it)

I appreciate the concerns about future compatibility, but providing non-
standard features as a (well-explained) option doesn't decrease it, and it
is a major change from the bull-in-a-china-shop methods of many past software
manufacturers. The best of both worlds, you might say.

John, who still remembers when they changed the damn system load address from
the PET to the 64 which broke EVERYTHING, even some Basic!
-- 
"The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to those of us
 who are fortunate enough never to have been one -- sort of like watching
 Charlie Chaplin trying to cook a shoe."
			-- the new and improved Fortune database