>OS 9 introduced the Multiple Users feature, where a few different users can
>"Log In" to a computer, and get their documents, preferences etc.
>
>If you have a background-only application, you can register a notification
>with the folder manager, and every time someone logs in, your bg-only
>application will be notified. This means you can do things when users log in
>and out. I'm trying to write an application that registers one of these
>notifications, and then sends AppleEvents whenever a user logs in/out.
>
>I've got enough C++ source code to do this, but as I don't know much C++,
>I've got no idea about putting the code together to get a working
>application.
Stewart,
technically we could of course add messages to FreeCard that are triggered
on such events, though we might want to add a way to turn this on or off,
as I doubt registering for all possible callbacks the Toolbox has would aid
in giving FreeCard good performance. Anthony can tell you whether that
could work automatically, e.g. by having the compiler detect messages of
certain names and then install the proper callbacks.
However, we will have to be very careful about this, as FreeCard is trying
to be cross-platform. Either it would be a MacOS-only feature, or we would
have to structure these messages in a way that we can re-map any
Unix/Linux/Windows notifications to the proper messages, too.
>And to make this post more FreeCard-ish.... In REALbasic you can compile
>your application, then use ResEdit to set the "Background-only" bit in the
>"SIZE" resource to true. You've then got an application extension or a
>BG-only app. It would be insanely useful to be able to do this with compiled
>HyperCard stacks, but they just crash when you launch them. Would it be
>possible to get FreeCard to do this kind of thing?
The reason HyperCard crashes is that background-only applications are not
allowed to create a menu bar or do other user-interface things (there are
some exceptions, like system-global floating windows, but you have to be
careful). Apparently, RealBasic is prepared for this, or you are just
lucky. I think we could allow doing this with FreeCard, though I am again
not sure how this would be achieved on other platforms. However, I think
this is again something we will not want to tackle until 1.0 is out the
door. But again, it is something to keep an eye out for, so we don't make
any assumptions that will break background-only applications.
PS - I have just resumed work on XBF. I have now fixed it to have only 1
byte of flags for blocks, I have removed the type field used for endian
conversion and will be moving the code to care about that to the XStackFile
wrapper class. Finally, I have changed the code to declare the difference
between logical and physical length wasted (i.e. re-usable for new blocks),
although rethinking it tells me that I have traded one byte against two
now, as a wasted entry consists of an offset and a length :-( But we will
have some space savings after compacting through this, because then the
logical length field on every block would be equal to the physical length,
while now we'd have no wasted entries at all! What's on the schedule now is
finishing XStackFile.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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'The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...'
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