In old versions of AfterStep, an icon to be used in Wharf must contain at least one transparent pixel, otherwise the symptoms you've mentioned will be prevalent. Simply add a transparent pixel and everything should work flawlessly.
Newer versions of AfterStep fix this problem, allowing you to use icons without transparent pixels in the Wharf without problems. You should really upgrade to the latest version.
Odds are you are using a 256 color (8bit) display. A quick explanation is that you can only have 256 colors on the screen at the same time, and the more colors you use in Wharf (the button bar), the less you can use for other applications and icons. I would suggest upgrading your video hardware or using more conservative (less colorful) icons. For netscape, an option is to run it with the 'netscape -install' command. This will ensure that netscape gets a good deal of the color that it wants. It will, however, also result in the colors flashing whenever you move the mouse in or out the Netscape window. You decide whether you can live with that.
One trick, apparently, is to run AfterStep without a Wharf. That reduces the number of colors used at any onc time.
You might want to use low-color icons, as well; you can find a good collection of low-color icons (all of them together use only 21 colors) at : http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~kiwi/AfterStep/.
If you are using asclock, you can configure it to use fewer colors.
After version 1.4, AfterStep uses config. files ending with "8bpp" for 8 bit displays, and low-color icons from icon/8bpp. Just modify these files to use less colors.
So far, no solution has surfaced to this problem. It appears that AfterStep
is not handing over control of the display. There seem to be other related
problems of this nature, all on Suns. Any additional information would be
appreciated : Gerhard den Hollander gerhard@jason.nlis working on this
problem.
You are most likely running out of colors. Either upgrade your hardware, switch to a higher color depth (i.e. 16 bpp or higher), or use icons that contain fewer colors.
It's beyond easy. An xpm is a simple text file. Therefore, the only image manipulation software you will need is vi. If you edit your xpm, you will become aware of the beauty and simplicity. At the bottom you will notice a character representation of your image. At the top there is a color listing corresponding to each pixel of the character representation.
You have two options to create a transparent pixel:
c None
If you're the slightest bit unsure, take a look at one of the xpm files in the AfterStep distribution's icons directory.
The `correct' size for a Wharf icon is 48x48 pixels. However, if you use bigger icons, they will display correctly, up to 64x64, which is the default size for the Wharf buttons.
A lot of 8bpp programs don't work on displays without a PseudoColor visual available. A lot of PC X servers don't support PseudoColor visuals on displays running in TrueColor mode. You should buy an SGI. Or run two simultaneous X servers, if you're on Linux.
Note for SGI users willing to play with their bpp :
One has to tweak the arguments to X in /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers.
The following worked for Tim Buller buller@math.ukans.edu
:0 secure /usr/bin/X11/X -bs -c -nobitscale -visid 0x34
Where Visual ID 0x34 (reported by xdpyinfo) is:
visual: visual id: 0x34
class: TrueColor
depth: 24 planes
available colormap entries: 256 per subfield
red, green, blue masks: 0xff, 0xff00, 0xff0000
significant bits in color specification: 8 bits
xv doesn't cope well with 16bpp in three ways. First, it can't grab pieces of the screen. Second, if you grab pieces of the screen with xwd and try to display them with xv, it doesn't work well. xwud works. Third, if you display a 24bpp picture, it doesn't bother to dither it down to 16bpp, resulting in bad pictures.
Sorry guy, but icon names change since AfterStep 1.1. Upgrade.
With the default, triple-clicking on a window titlebar toggles a window's always-on-top state. Triple-click again to remove it. If you want to remove this feature, locate the lines in your feel file that look like this (there are several of them):
PutOnTop "TripleClick"
and comment them out.
You know, it would be really nice if the Wharf supported text titles/cascading
menus/tabs on the side/plug-in modules/swallowing running applications in
folders/scrollbars on folders/starting applications only if they're not already
running. Why doesn't someone do it?
This is a holy war. You will be crucified at dawn. Unless you implement it yourself and post a patch.
No, seriously, there has been a lot of discussion about these topics.
Many people believED that AfterStep should be kept as close as possible to the original NEXTSTEP interface, while others thought it should be extended and be made as configurable as possible.
Now WindowMaker is following the original NEXTSTEP interface, while AfterStep is going its own way. Extensive configurability is one of these "own ways".
So please say exactly what you'd like to be implemented; or, even better, do it yourself and send us a patch.
Three "features" wishes will be grated to each user (just joking).