harrow@exodus.DEC (Jeff Harrow NCSE TWO/E92 DTN=247-3134) (05/13/85)
Ahh, a chance to "give back" some information TO the net...
Last week I noticed a cryptic comment indicating that the original
"Guided Tour" disks held a Desk Accessory called "Journal".
I tend to look through things for unusual items, and didn't remember
this one, so out came the old disk for a look-see. Well, the Apple menu
did NOT have this new desk accessory. Hummmm...
Not to be deterred, I fired up the Desk Accessory Mover and looked: Yes,
it WAS there, called ".Journal". But, why couldn't I SEE it in the
menu? Further examination of disk's set of Desk Accessories showed
another "invisible" item called ".Print" (notice the pattern?)
Well, using the Resource Editor I copied .Journal out (open SYSTEM on
the Guided Tour disk, then open resource DRVR, and you'll see it)
and inserted it into the system of a test disk (put it in the same
place), RENAMING it to "Journal" (removing the leading period.) (I
don't remember why I didn't use the DAM for this, I suspect it should
have worked, but this is how I did it.)
Journal now showed up in the Apple menu and, when selected, put up a
new menu item "Journal". This yielded RECORD, PLAY, STOP, and EXIT
items. Choosing RECORD and then doing a number of actions on the
desktop (opening disks, looking at menus, etc.) and then going back to
the Journal menu and choosing STOP and then PLAY yielded a replay of all
of my actions in the same time intervals that I originally did them!
Neat! (Note that the script of my actions are kept in a newly created
file called "journal.jrnl" which is overwritten with each new invocation
of RECORD.)
Well, let's continue the experimentation: I fired up an application
(Fontmover, I think) while RECORDing the movements, did some stuff,
quit the application back to the desktop, re-selected Journal from the
Apple menu to re-display the Journal menu, chose STOP and then PLAY.
Well, it STARTED to replay my movements, but the system crashed (ID=10)
when "my" journaled mouse began to open the application icon. I tried
numerous variations of this, but the end result was similar: Once I
attempted to open the application, things went out to lunch during
PLAYback of the journal.
Now, it seems to me that I remember that when an application exits, all
desk accessories are closed. If this is true (and indeed the Journal
menu item was always gone when the new application came up) then I
suspect that the journal.jrnl file was left with only part of the
journal intact and, probably, an inappropriate end-of-file, causing the
crash.
HOWEVER, a playback of the Guided Tour disk DOES prove that (someone)
CAN record and play back a journal which goes between the desktop and
numerous applications.
Can anybody shed some light on this?
Jeff
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Tewksbury, MA 01876jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (05/16/85)
If you lock the journal on the system heap, by setting the appropriate bits
with the Resource Mover, the journal WILL record actions across application
launches. It's been a couple of months since I experimented with this, so
I forget the details, but by experimenting I eventually got it to work this
way. It still got "bomb" errors sometimes, though.
Oh, I do remember one other essential thing... there is a menu resource
associated with the journal. It also has to be locked on the system heap.
If you fail to do this, when you pull down the menu after launching the
application, the menu comes up as a blank box (the right size but no text),
and when you release the mouse button, it gets a "bomb".
I hope this will be of some help, anyway... experiment, it does work! (sort
of).
--
Full-Name: J. Eric Roskos
UUCP: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer
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