Workbench Tutorial Part 2
PART 1: The Icon Information RequesterIf you can remember all those many moons ago, in Issue 3, we left the Workbench tutorial after explaining how to set up the various physical attributes of your Workbench screen. This issue, we're going to be explaining the hardware, invisible, attributes, such as Printer Prefs, Serial Prefs, etc.
The first thing you might want to set up is your Locale Preferences. This is only of relevance to WB3+ users, so people using lower than that, upgrade
.The Locale editor allows you to set your preferred language and time zone that Workbench will operate in. The top left of the Locale window shows you the available languages that you can use in Workbench. Click on one, and it appears in the 'Preferred languages' box. You can set the country you're in aswell, click on the country in the bottom left box.
The main feature of this window is the large world map which is located at the bottom right of the window. This sets your timezone. Just click on your area of the country you live in and the relavent time zone will be highlighted.
Moving on now, we'll take a quick look at the Input Editor. This is the thing which allows you to set the speed your mouse pointer goes at, the keyboard set up you want to use, and your keyboard speed settings.
Looking at the top section now, the mouse section. Notice there's a scroll bar which lets you choose from one of three positions. This is how fast your mouse will go. 1 being the slowest and 3 being the fastest. If you select one of those, it will take immediate effect so you'll notice the speed change.
You'll also notice that the pointer moves at the same speed as your mouse. Fine, you might say, but what if you're using some huge screenmode on a graphics card? It'd take ages to move the mouse from one end of the screen to the other, so Commodore implemented the Acceleration feature which you can use. The mouse accelerates as you move it, so it gets to where it's going faster.
I personally use speed 2+Acceleration on a puny 640x256 screen, and that's the only decent speed combination I can find. If you're using a larger screen you might want to use 3+Acceleration, but I wouldn't recommend using speed 1, with or without acceleration because it's just too damn slow.
You can also set the double click time. Note that the value next to the scroller that sets the double click delay is measured in 50ths of a second (or 60ths of a second depending on whether you're using NTSC or PAL) So a value of 50, would obviously mean the double click delay would be 1 second. I use 75.
The two boxes and buttons below this allow you to see how long the delay is, graphically. The second of the buttons let you test the double click. Click once, and again and it'll tell you if you double clicked in time.