Actually it is quite possible to do what Dilwyn says, as I demonstrate
in my FastFind program, released in 2002. You simply set the outline
to the whole screen without clearing the window. You have to provide
your own drawing routine, of course, to draw the interactive
"outline". Once the user is satisfied, the outline is set to the
desired size and the application window is redrawn.
In fact, FF demonstrates a number of techniques I, at least, have
never seen on the QL before, such as dropping the Move icon in favour
of using most of the title bar, resize, as described, MRU lists, etc.
This was my first attempt at a program that put form over
functionality, so its main function, finding stuff quickly, as the
name suggests, was/is a bit patchy and incomplete, although there is
some internal stuff too, that you wont find elsewhere, such as date
input menus, sophisticated wild card searches, my Memory Manager
(allowing for reserving and releasing tiny amounts of memory without
the heap fragmentation penalties of QDOS) etc. I dont think anyone
except Marcel ever bothered even to try it, so I cant be bothered to
waste any more time on improving it.
Per
Dilwyn Jones wrote:
Although I haven't tried it, I daresay that if the outline is a thin
application window to the left and another above the icon you
mention, it might be possible to click on this and to drag the
outline horizontally or vertically (instead of diagonally).
Additionally, if a different pointer (e.g. small double arrow) is
defined for these thin windows the pointer could change as it moves
into these windows.
The problem with this is that you are confined to the current PE
outline which is the current size of its main window. So you can
print an outline which can be altered but not made bigger than the
current window. This means that you can reduce the size of window by
this means but cannot increase it. My solution is to use another
program altogether to draw the outline which can be made as large as
the whole screen.
Ah, yes, the outline size limit of course.
Ah well, nice idea while it lasted :-(
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