gwe@cbnews.att.com (George W. Erhart) (11/26/90)
(First let me state that I do not have the SDK, but that is another story) I recently upgraded my machine to a 256 color capable video card. (Paradise 1024) I noticed as I was displaying 256 GIF files using wingif, that each GIF I loaded changed the overall color map. This has a rather anti-social effect on other applications that might have their own idea of what the color map should look like. The X window system handles this problem by managing the color map through the server. If all requests for colors are less than the number of free color cells in the color map, then there will be no conflicts between applications. If an application wants more colors than are currently available, the server will install a separate color map for that applications window. When the input focus (current window) moves into and out of that window, the server will flip between the overall color map and that window's color map. This is one area where windows appears to be quite backward ... any comments? -- George Erhart AT&T Bell Laboratories att!archie!gwe
chrisg@microsoft.UUCP (Chris GUZAK) (12/05/90)
In article <1990Nov26.130804.3496@cbnews.att.com> gwe@cbnews.att.com (George W. Erhart) writes: >(First let me state that I do not have the SDK, but that is another story) > >I recently upgraded my machine to a 256 color capable video card. (Paradise >1024) I noticed as I was displaying 256 GIF files using wingif, that each >GIF I loaded changed the overall color map. This has a rather anti-social >effect on other applications that might have their own idea of what the >color map should look like. I don't now what wingif does (if it is a well behaved palette app) but windows has a "palette manager" that controls who has priority in the system palette. The active window gets first shot at filling the palette. If there are more free entries other apps get those. If there are no more free entries colors are closest-matched to what is in the palette. This scheme favors the top app (the one you are working on), but gives the best approximation to all others. >This is one area where windows appears to be quite backward ... any comments? This is the way I want it to work... I'm sure there are other designs. >-- >George Erhart >AT&T Bell Laboratories >att!archie!gwe