Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!garfield!john13
From: john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: The Resource Problem
Keywords: every few months or so this comes up
Message-ID: <4595@garfield.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 88 23:24:59 GMT
Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 43

The idea of adding resources to the graphical display is fairly simple, with
several ways to do it. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of Intuition could
construct the functions necessary to read definitions for menus, gadgets,
etc from a file and use those to configure his display. Of course the format
one person would use would be incompatible with that of everyone else...

Nothing's stopping anybody from creating resource files that look like:

[myprog.res]
menu 1 is 5 items
	item 1 is "Open" shortcut O
	...
	item 5 is "Quit" shortcut Q
etc

window background pen is 2
window foreground pen is 3

window startup is
	position 100 50
	size 200 by 100

And so on, with appropriate error messages from your program if bad values /
wrong # of menu items or whatever or supplied. Why haven't I done so? Never
written anything big enough to warrant it! But it can already be done by
some applications (eg DME, via config file and command-line options) so why
not by everyone?

I don't think compatibility is a big concern, as long as no one creates some
sort of cryptic, bug ridden type of resource facility for some major
commercial program.

Some of this can already done by patching Intuition structures once the
program has started. I experimented with that a while back, and could
certainly do it a lot 'cleaner' now by using things like message ports to
track adjusted resources, eg menuitems with new text. Intuition is very
robust about things like this, as evidenced by 'Setfont', 'Add', 'VScreen',
etc.

John

PS To Davide Cervone, I've been unable to reach you by mail; could I get
sources + binaries to VScreen by mail? Your letter reached me fine.