[net.micro.mac] Problems with desk accessories

lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) (02/26/85)

I believe that the problem with some desk accessories not working with the
Desk Accessory Mover stems from the fact that the program assumes all desk
accessory names begin with a NUL.  Inside Macintosh recommends this
convention to avoid conflicts with files names that are the same as desk
accessory names.  The problem is that the DA Mover **incorrectly enforces**
this convention in a number of places.

You can usually tell if a DA is missing the NUL because the DA Mover sorts
the DAs by name, and those without NULs will sort at the end of the list --
apparently out of order.  Also, if you rename such a DA, the program will
chop off the first character of the name, because it expects it to be NUL.

You can fix everything by renaming the DAs that don't work.  The DA Mover
(correctly) inserts the NUL at the beginning of the string that you enter.
It is not necessary to rename them to an intermediate name first or copy
them into a separate file.

Programs that install desk accessories should automatically add the NUL to
the DA name (if not already present), but should not otherwise assume that
DA names begin with NUL.  

I have run into a similar problem with the sleep DA that was distributed
recently.  This is the one that comes packaged in an installation
application.  While you were in the installation program, certain DAs would
not work, because the program would prepend a NUL to the DA name that it
got out of the menu.  This made the OpenDeskAccessory call fail.  The
correct way to open a desk accessory is to get the name from the menu and
pass it unchanged to OpenDeskAccessory.

-- 
Larry Rosenstein

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