dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (06/08/88)
During the past couple of days, I've attempted to activate the
undocumented "click on a window's title bar to open/bring forward its
parent's window" feature. I tried doing this on my Mac II at home, and
my SE at work. In each case, I booted up under the monoFinder, launched
ResEdit (1.2d0 at work, 1.2d1 at home), opened the Finder application,
opened LAYO 128, set the "Title click" and "Use phys icon" options on,
closed the Finder, exited, and was immediately met with near-disaster.
On my II at home, the desktop reappeared in its usual shade of dark
green... but all of the disk and folder icons were entirely blacked
out... they looked like cutout slices of a black hole! Turning the
title-click and use-phys-icon bits back off with ResEdit did _not_ clear
up the problem.
On my SE at work, exiting from ResEdit led to an immediate system error
(which TMON caught). Upon rebooting, I was met with an alert box that
said "There's not enough memory to work with <my startup disk>";
clicking OK lead to a reboot, and a repeat of the same message.
In both cases, I was able to recover from the unfortunate lossage by
booting from the original System Tools 5.0 #1 floppy, copying its Finder
into my hard disk's System folder, and rebooting. Once I had done this,
I was able to turn the title-click and phys-icon bits on in the
freshly-copied Finder's LAYO 128 resource, and they worked as expected;
the weirdness did not recur.
Hypothesis: When I got my copy of the System 5.0 package, I upgraded
each of these two machines (from System 4.2/Finder 5.x[?]) by using the
appropriate Installer script. I suspect that the Installer script did
not update the LAYO resource properly (or at all?), perhaps leaving it
shorter than expected by Finder 6.0. Presumably, Finder 6.0 noticed
that the resource was an old (short) variety, and did not attempt to
interpret the new additions (which include "color style" and "max # of
windows"). When I attempted to update the LAYO resource with ResEdit,
the LAYO template graciously extended the old (small) LAYO to its new
(greater) size... filling the extra bytes with undefined sludge of some
sort. When I stored the updated [damaged] LAYO back into the Finder and
exited from ResEdit, the Finder attempted to interpret the garbage at
its end, and choked in interesting ways.
Suggestion and warning: if you're going to modify your Finder's LAYO
resource using ResEdit 1.2d0 or 1.2d1, I strongly suggest that you drag
a clean copy of Finder 6.0 from your original System Tools disk to your
working disk before doing so. Updating an older Finder's LAYO with
these versions of ResEdit may result in wonderful strangeness.
--
Dave Platt VOICE: (415) 493-8805
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