Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!super!udel!gatech!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!athertn!ericb
From: ericb@athertn.Atherton.COM (Eric Black)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Talking to Workbench
Summary: Keep snapshot functionality, but hide it?
Keywords: Workbench, snapshot
Message-ID: <251@mango.athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 12 Dec 88 21:01:54 GMT
References: <3039@sugar.uu.net> <6457@netnews.upenn.edu> <6458@netnews.upenn.edu> <5416@cbmvax.UUCP> <4XaVmTy00Vsf4D0Hli@andrew.cmu.edu> <1696@pur-phy> <12270@cup.portal.com> <1606@nmtsun.nmt.edu> <686@myrias.UUCP>
Reply-To: ericb@atherton.COM (Eric Black)
Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 40

In article <686@myrias.UUCP> cg@myrias.UUCP (Chris Gray) writes:
>In article <1606@nmtsun.nmt.edu> wncs302@nmtsun.nmt.edu (William Norris) writes:
>>As long as we're talking about WB facelifting:
>>	*	Keyboard shortcuts for the menus 
>>		What an IDEA!!  And soooo hard to implement.
>>	*	Get rid of snapshot.
>>	*	Select an area of icons a la Macintosh.
>>					William B. Norris IV
>
>DON'T get rid of snapshot! I use it to arrange things so that the windows
>come out where I want them. When you have a bunch of stuff on a hard disk,
>this can be quite useful, else you end up with a big mishmash of windows
>scattered all over the place.

Not only that, but there seems to be an increasing tendency for
applications to use big (I mean really big, huge even) icons.  One
example: Excellence!.  The WorkBench default locating of icons
if there is no location set on the .info file doesn't seem to handle
these very well at all.  I get lots of overlapping icons.  I'd love
for this to be handled correctly ("correctly" == `don't overlap either
icon imagery or name`); otherwise, I have to laboriously move icons
around, then snapshot them all.  Since the WorkBench location algorithm
doesn't seem to do the job, a "cleanup" jumbles things up again.  If this
is fixed, then I'll go along with punting "snapshot".  One alternative
might be to always snapshot, sort of like the M*c seems to do: if I move
it, leave it where I put it; otherwise, put it someplace appropriate.
If I have moved some things and not others, things get hairy, though...

BTW, I almost never (well, once or twice a year, usually for giving demos)
use WorkBench myself, but my wife does.  I prefer typing exactly what
I mean, especially given ConMan (thanks, Bill!!) and a nice shell
(each of Matt's and Bill's shells have nice points), but then again
I'm a UNIX life form, and not someone who uses a computer only to get
a job done (like typing papers, memos, letters to parents, drawing
pictures for Kindergarten dittos to color, etc.).
-- 
Eric Black	"Garbage in, Gospel out"
Atherton Technology, 1333 Bordeaux Dr., Sunnyvale, CA, 94089
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