Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!hsgj From: hsgj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Dan Green) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Workbench improvements Message-ID: <1846@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: Tue, 16-Dec-86 22:11:08 EST Article-I.D.: batcompu.1846 Posted: Tue Dec 16 22:11:08 1986 Date-Received: Wed, 17-Dec-86 23:34:57 EST Organization: Theory Center, Cornell U., Ithaca NY Lines: 38 Keywords: dont bother caching .> 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. (Or nearly; you may .>have to check time of last dir modification.) Amiga needs to support .>more caching-type ideas. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper. I've .>seen Workbench windows where the whole drawer was in ram:, and those .>things are FAST (if you can afford that much ram). But if it's just .>the icons in ram, you don't use much memory and still get great .>response on opening the drawers. .> .> 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. 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. For case (1), the cache doesn't pay because all the icons are only referenced once. For case (2), you are constantly moving (eg writing data) the icons, so the "cache" will always be writing thru to 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. I think the "ideal" situation would be for the linker to reserve 512 bytes or so as the header for each program, (and fopen'ing a new file could pad the top with the header also) and then store the .info in this area. Of course TYPE would have to be smart enough to skip the header, which is trivial. The "small" problem with this is that one would have to rewrite everything. I guess its not worth it :-) 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 -- ARPA: hsgj%vax2.ccs.cornell.edu@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu UUCP: ihnp4!cornell!batcomputer!hsgj BITNET: hsgj@cornella