gt0831c@prism.gatech.EDU (William Moss) (09/13/90)
What will be the next features in the heavilly escalating war of features between Berkely System's After Dark and Fifth Generation's Pyro? These are some guesses / suggestions: Desktop Invigoration: An option will allow the screen saving module to run slowly on the desktop while the mac is in use. After a period of timeout, it consumes the entire screen area and operates at normal speed. Idle Time Logging: An option will allow a person to keep track of the idle time on the mac (the times the screen saver kicks in and out). Eventually this feature might be escalated to encompass times spent on programs when the machine is active. Any Others... William Moss
tonyrich@titanic.cs.wisc.edu (Anthony Rich) (09/17/90)
William Moss writes: >What will be the next features in the heavily escalating war of features >between After Dark and Pyro? I'm hoping the next feature will be added by Apple: Screen-blanking protection in hardware. Last spring I argued that hardware should protect hardware. A local power flicker and a flaky keyboard here at the U of WI have convinced me. A momentary power outage this summer caused all the workstations in the CS department here to go down and automatically reboot. An officemate's machine got hung midway during its reboot sequence for some obscure reason, after displaying about 20 lines of boot messages. Since his machine was hung, the usual software screen saver wasn't up and running. The flicker happened on a Saturday. By the time he came in Monday and discovered the problem, the boot messages were burned into the 19" monitor. The corresponding problem on a Mac would be to have an INIT hang during an unattended (perhaps remote) reboot; the "Welcome to Macintosh" message and the already-displayed INIT icons would burn into the screen. I don't know if that has ever happened on a Mac yet, but if it hasn't, it's just a matter of time. Recently on another officemate's workstation, the keyboard went flaky and spontaneously began generating a stream of slash characters, even though nobody was using it! The screen showed "Login: ///////////////////". The display wasn't changing, but the software screen saver didn't kick in, apparently because the keyboard was still active (generating slashes). I came in that evening and noticed that the screen wasn't blanked, so I turned the brightness down to zero manually. Sheesh. I think the lack of screen activity (*just* the screen!) should be detected by hardware, which could generate a "screen needs blanking" event. If no software screen-saver responds to that event, a simple hardware screen blackout should be triggered. Lots of those old 80x25 character-based terminals did hardware screen-blanking; I'm sure the Mac could, too. -- Tony -- ----------------------------------------- | EMAIL: tonyrich@titanic.cs.wisc.edu | | Disclaimer: I speak only for myself. | -----------------------------------------
jan@bagend.uucp (Jan Isley) (09/18/90)
>A momentary power outage this summer caused all the workstations in the >CS department here to go down and automatically reboot. An officemate's >machine got hung midway during its reboot sequence for some obscure reason, >after displaying about 20 lines of boot messages. Since his machine was >hung, the usual software screen saver wasn't up and running. >The flicker happened on a Saturday. By the time he came in Monday and >discovered the problem, the boot messages were burned into the 19" monitor. Burned into the monitor in a few days?! A small exageration is pardonable but a monitor that brands itself in 2 or 3 days is certainly not! How about a few more details and have you shot the salesnoid yet. >I think the lack of screen activity (*just* the screen!) should be detected >by hardware, which could generate a "screen needs blanking" event. If >no software screen-saver responds to that event, a simple hardware screen >blackout should be triggered. Lots of those old 80x25 character-based >terminals did hardware screen-blanking; I'm sure the Mac could, too. Certainly. I am looking at a Wyse 60 that is several years old with no ghosts on the screen. It dims itself after 15 minutes. I had a vt100 with no screen blanking that took years to leave a ghost on the screen. jan -- Signatures!? | Jan Isley jan@bagend We don't need no stinking signatures. | known_universe!gatech!bagend!jan
liberte@yoyodyne.ncsa.uiuc.edu (09/21/90)
Screen fading, a la Lisa, could be done easily with color table manipulation. I would like to be able to launch an application to run either as a screensaver or in the background while another screensaver runs. I know Darkness runs applications as screensavers, but it does other things I dont like. My background application would do time consuming things like ray tracing or bug evolution. Of course, the application should be interrupted when there is other activity, at which time it should be able to save its data away for the next idle time. If the screensaver selected by the user cannot run due to heavy memory requirements, an alternate (from a list) should be used instead. Maybe AD or Pyro do this already. I just glanced at the After Dark programmers packet (whatever it is called - it belongs to someone else) and noticed that modules may be written in a number of different languages. However, it appears that global vars are not allowed (maybe some languages support globals?), and debugging would be difficult since there is no skeleton to run your module within the programming environment. Is this true? Dan LaLiberte National Center for Supercomputing Applications liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu
news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU (Six o'clock News) (09/22/90)
>Screen fading, a la Lisa, could be done easily with color >table manipulation. From: bruce@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Bruce Burkhalter) Path: cory.Berkeley.EDU!bruce Actually gamma table dimming works a little better but not all monitors support it. Clut dimming is a little chunky when it dims. >If the screensaver selected by the user cannot run due to heavy >memory requirements, an alternate (from a list) should be used instead. >Maybe AD or Pyro do this already. Both Pyro! and AD will choose different modules if there is not enough memory. Pyro! has a scheme of "primary" and "secondary" modules. AD defaults to its builtin module. >I just glanced at the After Dark programmers packet (whatever it is >called - it belongs to someone else) and noticed that modules may be >written in a number of different languages. However, it appears that >global vars are not allowed (maybe some languages support globals?), >and debugging would be difficult since there is no skeleton to run your >module within the programming environment. Is this true? Globals aren't allowed in code resources in many development systems. Think C allows them, though. I wrote an AD shell for Think C to provide source level debugging. It isn't "shippable" but it works ok. Hopefully I can polish it up and post it. >Dan LaLiberte >National Center for Supercomputing Applications >liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu Bruce Burkhalter After Dark Project Manager Berkeley Systems, Inc.