Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!gatech!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!ack
From: ack@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Andy J. Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: SUM
Message-ID: <9344@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 18 Jul 88 19:40:17 GMT
References: <460@cf-cm.UUCP> <46100184@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <9340@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: ack@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Andy J. Williams)
Organization: Kiewit Computation Center, Dartmouth College
Lines: 34

In article <9340@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> isle@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ken Hancock) writes:

>Please INIT writers, try to let users know what's going on...
>* Shift key not to load (and resedit instructions to change it to any key)
>* Icon for loading using ShowINIT
>* Icon for not loading using modified ShowINIT
>* Don't assume.  There's dozens of INITs out there.  You have no way
>  of knowing what's already been changed.  Not everyone's INIT can load
>  first.

Amen to that.  As an aside, we are designing an INIT to register a person's
name with a mail server upon startup.  We ran into some problems and
contacted some people who gave us some sound advice on writing INITS which
includes:

Don't put up any Dialogs at startup.  Pictures are ok, ShowINIT type stuff is
fine.
Don't call InitWindows or InitDialogs.
Preserve registers when the INIT is entered and restore them when you exit.
What grafport are you passing to _InitGraf?  Are you setting up your
own?
They also advise that the best way to learn about INITs is to walk through
an INIT that you know works with TMON or MacsBug and see what they do.

>Ken Hancock                        |    UUCP: isle@eleazar.dartmouth.edu
>Personal Computing Ctr. Consultant |  BITNET: isle@eleazar.dartmouth.edu
>__________________________________/ \____________________________________
>DISCLAIMER: If people weren't so sue-happy, I wouldn't need one!

-Andy
Andy J. Williams '90   |Ack Systems: ack@eleazar.dartmouth.edu|   _   /|
Software Development   +--------------------------------------+   \`o_O' ACK!
Kiewit Computation Ctr |Hello. Set $NAME='Iinigo Montoya' You |     ( )  /
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