dce@Solbourne.COM (David Elliott) (06/04/89)
While reading through Inside Macintosh, Volume V, I've become somewhat
confused on how much work the system does in terms of handling color.
Looking at the descriptions of handling color cursors and color
icons, it appears that all programs wishing to handle color items
if available should first ask for a color version of the item, using
it if it exists, and otherwise handling the item in the "old" way.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to have one set of routines that
would handle the best item for the given screen (i.e., if the
program asks for an icon named "bird" and the screen is 8 bits
deep, it would first look for a cicn, and then for an ICON, and
if the screen is 1 bit deep, it would go in the opposite order)?
Maybe someone out there has written an LSC library to handle this
kind of stuff?
The confusing issue is whether or not a program should query the system
for the screen depth before starting. It appears that the correct
thing to do is to just assume full color availability, and let the
routines take care of the actual screen depth. On the other hand,
since the cursor and icon routines don't generalize, I have to
wonder whether or not the others do.
--
David Elliott dce@Solbourne.COM
...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce