[comp.sys.mac.programmer] NoteAlert Memory Req'ts

ech@cbnewsk.att.com (ned.horvath) (03/12/91)

From article <1991Mar8.222918.5713@ohs.uucp>, by stay@ohs.uucp (Steve Taylor):
> In a growzone function, there's 8K free and I call NoteAlert with
> an alert that must be 200-300 bytes maximum.  Somewhere in the call
> to NoteAlert, my growzone function gets called with a request for
> 10K.  Why in the world would NoteAlert need 10K?  I'm not loading
> any segments or anything.  When I re-wrote the growzone function
> to use GetNewDialog with the same DITL but a dialog this time, it
> worked fine.  Does anyone have any ideas why NoteAlert would want
> that much memory?  Thanks.

SWAG (Sophisticated Wild-Ass Guess): NoteAlert uses the "note" icon, which
in turn uses the the note cicn if it's available.  cicn-painting is very
memory-intensive, it requires an 8K buffer plus the cicn resource itself.

I don't know if the same memory requirements obtain if the cicn isn't present.

There also was a bug in the NoteAlert (StopAlert, CautionAlert) traps in
the Mac II -- that 8K was allocated on EVERY call, but was never freed.
The bug was reported to and confirmed by Apple DTS, but I haven't gone
looking for it recently, I just killed off those cicns in my system file
and kept on going, so I don't know if it was ever patched.

=Ned Horvath= 
ehorvath@attmail.com