Subject: Re: Ultimate AmigaDOS enhancements?
From: [email-masked] (Adrian Demarais)
Date: 4 Jun 1994 06:56:13 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc

Elof: Amiga Advocate ([email-masked]) wrote:
: I have an A4000/030 and I am trying to customise AmigaDOS to produce the 
: ultimate OS.  I have an ulterior motive: I am trying to impress my friend
: (who owns an Acorn Archimedes) with the Amigas general wonderfulness.  
: Therefore I would be grateful to hear what programs other people are 
: using.  I currently have the following:

: MagicWB: New icons, patterns, fonts.
: MUI: OO system to create and maintain GUI's
: CTM: Patch cycle gadgets to give drop-down menus
: Toolsdaemon 2.1: Add tools to the WB menus
: Kingcon 1.3: Shell enhancer w/ filename completion + much more
: Icon Manager: Give iconless files icons according to filetype
: Magic Menu: Popup menus, nice new look
: Addpower: Multipurpose utility

: Can anyone add to this list?  

  I like the ParM/BrowserII combo. The same handler takes care of
menuing for both, and adds mouse acceleration, pointer blanking,
window to front/back clicking, and screen flipping by mouse click,
sunmouse, etc.  Browser II is the superior file management util, with
as many windows open as you want, filetype recognition, internal
multitasking (continue while file copying is proceeding, etc), window
iconification, etc. Browser II's windows are app-windows, so you can
drag a disk or drawer icon from WB into them to open them within
Browser.

  Which reminds me, the Iconify/menufy package is nice. A
ctrl-double.click collapses a window into a small icon (or menu entry)
on WB, saving much more space than a mininized window, and looking
better at the same time.

  An impressive screen blanker is important. I'm using Garshneblanker,
but Midnight sounds good also, with some new modules recently posted
such as Flying Toilets. A blanker that comes with Garshneblanker will
run the command of your choice, so you could use a slide show or
animation as a blanker.  I've seen another blanker do this, but
Garshneblanker's one will run a second command to stop the process. If
you grab breakname while you're at it, so that you can kill the
process without knowing its number (almost impossible to know in
advance), it should work witth everything you can throw at it.

  Lastly, if you use public screens at all, PubUtils will open new
public screens for you, oversized autoscrolling ones if you wish. I'm
running Workbench on a 1600 x 1000 Super72 screen, and Terminus on a
850 x 600 Super72 opened by Openscreen from the PubUtils package. I
used CliAnywhere to induce Terminus to open on this screen as if it
were the Workbench screen, so that now any program that would have
opened on WB, will open here instead, IF it's the frontmost
screen. That is the way public screens SHOULD have been designed,
instead of this stupid MSoft-like "Make default/shanghai on"
nonsense. If you get PubUtils, also get SM (screenmanager). It
performs the same function as openscreen, but will also tell you the
screenmode ID numbers needed to open the more exotic screen types
(such as Super72). You can then use the number SM gives you (in hex)
in Openscreen, once you convert it to decimal.  The problem SM has is
that it won't open an autoscrolling screen, making anything larger
than the default overscan size useless. Personally, I think one of the
most impressive things Amiga can do is run a large, autoscrolling
screen.  Macs & X-Windows boxes have screens you can push windows off
the edges of, but still limit you to the real estate you see. Only
Amiga lets you move off the edges...