X-Master 1.1, the free system extension manager and HackMaster successor has
been released today. Unfortunately, we had some serious issues in 1.0,
especially with Visor Prisms.
(learned the hard way that Palm OS on a Handspring device is not exactly the
same as Palm OS on a Palm device :-(
Hopefully, all these problems are fixed now in v 1.1.
Hack developers are welcome to try the new version and ship X-Master with
their Hacks if they want (unlike HackMaster, X-Master is freeware).
Please consider changing the name Hack to system extension. Both TealMaster
and X-Master refer to Hacks now as system extensions and I really believe
this name change would benefit all the non-geek users.
There have been requests for implementing a call-back functionality for hack
deactivation, apparently mainly for memory-cleanup. (Anybody has a good use
case?)
It seems that some Hacks patch FtrUnregister to be implicitely notified of a
deactivation when the feature that contains the original code address is
removed. While this will currently work with X-Master (as it did with
HackMaster), it is clearly Dirty Programming...
We'd like to implement an API for activation/deactivation notification in
X-Master 1.2.
Here's a first rough idea for a compatible solution:
Activation
- add a code 999 segment and a TRAP ID 999 1 resource to your system
extension (regular traps start from 1000)
- this code segment will be locked, called and unlocked prior to activation
Deactivation
- register a code segment of your choice with X-Master via launch code. If
you do this in the activation handler, this code segment will be ignored
when patching systraps (i.e. it could be the old FtrUnregister code)
- after deactivation of the extension, X-Master locks that code segment,
calls it, and unlocks it
Your feedback is greatly appreciated...
Best regards,
Andreas Linke
http://linkesoft.com/
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