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From: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Workbench improvements
Message-ID: <1699@vax135.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 18-Dec-86 20:10:13 EST
Article-I.D.: vax135.1699
Posted: Thu Dec 18 20:10:13 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 19-Dec-86 02:49:40 EST
References: <1846@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 51
Keywords: dont bother caching

In article <1846@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> hsgj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Dan Green) writes:
>.>                       The "big file of icons" seems like a big win to
>.>me if one assumes that it is cached.  Then closing and opening drawers
>.>that have once been opened becomes instantaneous.
>.>
>.>	Charles Poirier  (USENET)!vax135!cjp
>
>I don't know about the icon cache idea.  On the amiga, where you can
>pop out the disk at any time, all caches had better well be write thru.

Yes, certainly.

>And for icons, generally the user is going to be doing one of two 
>things:  (1) just wants to see the icons long enough to boot ye olde
>WordProDeluxeWithTurboSpeedMegaPower, or (2) the user wants to play
>around rearranging the display of the icons on the screen.

Yeah, no benefit for these two cases.  (1) is most common, (2) i think
is pretty uncommon.  But just suppose one has a single icons file per
DISK.  Then one can do "browsing" type things on Workbench,
painlessly.  Open drawer, look around, say 'oops', close, open
different drawer.  All for ONE icon file read per disk.

>   My "vote" so far is for having one file of icons for each folder.
>The huge pain with this method, though, is that it is now very difficult
>to create an icon for a new program or file (ie you can't just dup an
>existing .info file).  Of course, the speed benefit is nice.

No pain.  Invoke a tool, "copy icon", then click on the pic you want.

>   My FINAL EXAM opinion is that I would rather have C/Amiga concentrate
>its resources more on bettering Intuition and on making neater hardware,
>then on worrying about the silly WorkBench...
>-- Dan Green

Workbench AT PRESENT is silly because the time wasted in looking up
icons makes it SLOWER than using CLI.  Mind, I prefer CLI anyway, but
the world has both kinds of people.  Why not have both interfaces the
best they can be?  Besides, the d**n redundant icon files get in my way
when I am using CLI -- if there was a single file of icons, you not
only would be free of the .icon clutter, but you could use it directly
for dir listings.  Correct me if I'm wrong.  Of course there could be
compatibility problems, but maybe a few conversion utilities would
suffice -- say, for converting old-style icon disks to single-icon-file
disks.  And for old programs that insist on writing their own icon
files, maybe a background task (or file system patch) that intercepts
.icon files.  I've not considered everything, but it's worth thinking
about.

	Cheers,
	Charles Poirier   (USENET)!vax135!cjp