papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) (11/04/90)
Since already 3 people asked, I'll save myself some typing by posting for general consumption. Q: What are "public" screens? A: A public screen is a "custom" screen that allows "visitor" windows to open on it. The following excerpt from the Intuition DevCon 90 notes, "Intuition 2.0 -- Documentation Update", by Jim Mackraz, should give you the general idea: "Many developers and power users have requested support for "shared custom screens". They wish to bring up utilities such as text editor on an application custom screen such as a terminal emulator [i.e. A-Talk III's Full Screen mode]. ... these requests can be satisfied by new support in Intuition for what we call "public screens". ... When opening a screen under the new system, you may declare your screen a public screen by specifying a public screen name for it. ... Once you have a public screen, visitor windows can be opened on it in several ways. If no screen name is provided, the visitor window will open on the default public screen. If a name is provided, the visitor window will open on the named screen if available." [*] [*] The original DevCon notes from which the excerpts are taken are Copyright 1990 Commodore-Amiga, Inc. Of course, the above method works only with Intuition 2.0. For 1.3, Willy Langeveld's had designed his own "public" screen method, and included it in a freely redistributable library named "screenshare.library", callable from Arexx macros and providing support for most intuition features, such as windows and gadgets. The nice thing is that Willy has now updated that library so that it will sense under which OS (1.3 or 2.0) is running under and in case it is running under 2.0, it will "translate" its calls to the appropriate Intuition 2.0 calls. Therefore, to support BOTH old Arexx macros that use screenshare.library AND the 2.0 Intuition public screens, A-Talk III Release 1.3e senses the version of the OS and, if requested, will try to open screenshare.library (under 1.3), or open the screen as public (under 2.0). Applications (Arexx macros) written for screenshare.library will run under the 2.0 OS with absolutely NO changes whatsoever. To be backward compatible with older version of A-Talk III, by default, A-Talk III Release 1.3e DOESN'T opens its custom screen in public mode. An A-Talk III screen can be explicitly declared public in one of two ways. From the CLI: atalk3 [PUBLIC <name>] ex: atalk3 PUBLIC ATK From a Workbench ToolType: PUBLIC=<name> ex: PUBLIC=ATK Of course, since A-Talk III supports multiple serial boards or internal modems, it is possible to have "multiple public screens", such as: 1.> atalk3 PUBLIC ATK (required by PLINK selector.atk macro) 2.> atalk3 PUBLIC ATK-bix Enjoy. -- Marco -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= "Xerox sues somebody for copying?" -- David Letterman -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=