New article for developers

I've written a short article for OS4coding.net that informs about the little intricacies of OS4 Intuition screen programming. Enjoy!

Direct link to article

Always enjoy your proffesional style of writing articles, as well as topic of them. Even if i already ready beta-versio of article, i re-read it again, and its for sure interesting.

@kas1e

Thanks!

Great article! This is the kind of information we need!

nice article, but this:

".. they can also be mouse-dragged vertically to reveal other screens hiding behind."

is incomplete knowledge ;) Screen can be dragged in ANY direction since AOS4 -- not just vertically :)

cheers,
nexus

Nice and informative article even for plain users like me, thanks

Quote:

Good point, thanks. Corrected now in the article.

thanks for article and thanks for using your time for AmigaOS :)

Nice :)

Although I might add that rather than requiring every single program to add "a checkbox option letting the user to clone the Workbench screen" along side the "standard screenmode selector"... it would make FAR more sense if the standard screenmode selector had this option itself. This would have to be implemented as a special screenmode id that the system knows must be a copy of Workbench's. Ideally the special id would be fixed, so that it remained the same even after screenmodes change (so that even broken programs which store the screenmode id in a prefs file will still work, while non-broken programs would have to handle this id as a special case so that they re-used it instead of saving the resolution/depth in a prefs file for BestScreenModeID).

@Nexus
Quote:


Missed that one. how ?

@ChrisH

Nice idea.
I just filled an enhancement request in OS4 bugzilla. (bug #7806)


@JosDuchIt

Prefs/GUI, in "Control" section

@Elwood

Quote:

That doesn't tell him how to do it though. Only how to setup what can be done.

@JosDuchit

Press the shift key whilst dragging with the screen titlebar with the mouse. Or press shift as well as the "Meta Drag Qualifier" which is usually the LAmiga key to drag in any direction from any point on the screen.

@ChrisH

Some of the "requirements" mentioned in the article are mere recommendations, tendencies and envisioned solutions, based on the current state of things. As I've hinted in a comment beneath the article, Hyperion may easily prove me wrong by introducing features or API calls that will change it all.

Interesting read.

I found the following intruiging.

3.2 Greater window mobility
Using a new feature in Window Class (introduced in AmigaOS 4.1 Update 3), ReAction-based programs can now “jump” between screens freely during their runtime.

How do you achieve this ?
In MUI you have icons in the window bar that can jump your application to a public screen, but I see no such icons in any apps using Reaction windows.

Or does the ability have to be hard coded by the developer of the application ?

I am interested in this because the new shell can do everything that KingCon could apart from being able to jump onto another screen.

@BillE

The developer decides whether his/her program will support screen jumping, by passing two specific tags at window creation time. Read Rigo's tutorial that relates to this new feature:

http://www.os4coding.net/blog/rigo/bo ... nu-functionality-part-one