ScreenX Documentation - By Steve Tibbett. ScreenX is a program designed to be put into your Startup sequence. It provides a number of things that are already available in different packages, along with a couple of it's own twists. NOTE: INFO NEW TO V2.1 IS AT THE END OF THIS DOCUMENT. Clearly Written Documentation?? Come on, it's a PD program!! ScreenX's major functions are: 1: Provide a small clock/memory counter on the Workbench Screen, which will take very little processor time yet be accurate. 2: Provide a means to recover those screens that are "Lost" behind those stupid programs that don't bother to put Depth gadgets on their screens. IE, Chessmaster. 3: Provide an easy way to save a screen to an IFF file (Easier than "Flip the screen you want to the front within 10 seconds" anyway). 4: Give me something to do for a couple of evenings. 5: Be small enough to be put into your Startup Sequence and not take much memory. ScreenX accomplishes all of these quite well. ScreenX has two modes of operation: When it is "Awake", and when it is "Sleeping". When it is sleeping, it is sitting on the Workbench screen showing you how much Chip and Fast RAM you have, and the current time. If you click in the ScreenX window (Thus activating it - You cannot tell if the window is active or not because of the text that's being printed on the title bar. Just click in it and you will know it's active). When it's window is active, you can either hit the Space Bar or the Right Mouse Button to "Wake Up" ScreenX. When ScreenX is awake, it opens up it's own Screen (Taking about 25K of memory doing so, which is why I made the small window in the first place). On the left of this screen is a list of all the screens that are currently in the system, and on the right of the screen are 7 gadgets allowing you to tell the program what to do. These gadgets are: Pop Screen To Front: This gadget will take the currently selected screen and pop it to the front. Handy for getting 'Hidden' screens back. Push Screen To Back: If you have 4 screens in memory, and one of them doesn't have Depth gadgets, you can push that one to the back, and as long as you don't click any of the other screens back behind it, you won't have any problems. (If you do click anything else behind it, you'll have to use ScreenX to get them back!) Update Screen List: This will redraw the list of screens that is being shown. Necessary if any of the screens there leave while you are looking at them, or if new screens appear. Note that any action taken on a screen that is no longer around is ignored (even clicking on it). Cycle All Screens: I'll let you figure this one out on your own. Note that to make it stop, you must click anywhere in the main ScreenX screen... Close Screen: Danger. You got it. This isn't something you should be doing unless you KNOW what you are doing. It will let you CLOSE DOWN the screen of your choice. The problem with this is that if anybody else decides to write on that screen at any time, BOOMO. What it's really useful for is when a program crashes, you can close it's screen to free up a bunch of Chip RAM that is taken up. Just make sure you don't go closing the Workbench down, or something stupid like that. OK? Save Screen to IFF File: This gadget will instantly turn the screen Red (so you know something's going on), and save the screen selected into the filename in the Text gadget at the bottom of the screen. Note that the filename in that gadget must include the full pathname, or else if you just type a filename in there, it will be written to the current directory. That's about it. If you have any problems, or any suggestions, please give my BBS a call (if you have a modem), or send me a large box of money with a note in it if you don't have a modem. Oh ya, I suppose some of you will actually want to PRINT screens with this - that's coming. So is a Hot Key to get the thing up any time, rather than having to fish up the Workbench screen first. Oh ya #2, there are a couple of command line options for this thing too. If you run it from the Workbench, it will open the "Sleeping" window, but if you run it from the CLI, it will assume you want the "Awake" window. If you really want the sleeping window from the CLI, use the -S option. Also, in order to keep the clock and memory count accurate, ScreenX updates it's little window 6 times a second. If you find this slowing things down a bit, you can use the -E (efficient) option from the CLI to make it only update the window once every 2 seconds or so. ...Steve (Feeling guilty? Just dying to send money somewhere? I couldn't leave out my address, now, could I?) Steve Tibbett 2710 Saratoga Pl. #1108 Gloucester, Ontario K1T 1Z2 (or just call my BBS at 613-731-3419). (or send me BIX mail at 'S.Tibbett') Actually, if you want the source for it, send me a disk with some sort of a return mailer thing, (maybe even throw in some cash, eh?), and I'll send it to ya. Addendum: Now, whenever you pop a screen to the front, ScreenX assumes you don't want it any more, and shrinks itself into the small window. Just thought you'd like to know. /*********************************/ NEW INFO FOR V2.1 OF SCREENX: /*********************************/ I don't think anybody ever actually wanted ScreenX to come up with the big window open, so I took that option out altogether. When you say "Run ScreenX", it just opens the small window. Put ScreenX in your startup sequence! If you want to put ScreenX in your Startup-Sequence, you're going to have to use a program like RunBack or the arp Arun command or else you are not going to be able to close the CLI window that you ran ScreenX from. Stupid, eh? (It's not new to this version, but I don't think I told anybody this in the old docs). I added the ability to print screens. After seeing my name mentioned in Info magazine, I figured I owed it to the world... 8-). Anyways, click on the screen you want printed, and then click on "Print Screen" and it will start doing it. If you click on the Print Screen gadget while the screen is being printed, it will usually STOP the print (unlike most programs that tell you to click stop, but really they just ignore you). Little warning here about printing screens: Just after I added the Print Screen gadget, while I was testing it, I ran into a weird problem - I could print, say, the DiskX screen, but if I tried to print the ScreenX screen, or the Workbench screen, I'd get a blank page. Well, after THREE HOURS of working on this (starting at 11 PM..), I finally figured out that if your preferences are set for Black and White, and your screen colors are sorta not far enuf apart to be Black and White, it will print all white - White's an easy color to print... Anyway, either fiddle with the Threshold thing in Preferences, or use Grey Scale mode. Another new gadget: Screen Info. What this does, is tell you my BBS number! There are also some less useful stats there, like the current font that screen is using, the amount of memory that screen is using (Note: If it says 32K, it really means 32000 bytes), the number of Windows open on that screen, and the number of Gadgets on that screen. The depth of that screen too - Depth = Number Bitplanes. (It's always fun to run a bunch of programs, and then try to find all the gadgets...) Ummmm, that's about it for now I guess. If anybody can think of some more stats to stick in the "Screen Info" window, let me know - I sure can't. Plea: Instead of sending me money, feel free to send me original software. Especially if you write software - It costs you next to nothing to send me one, and who knows, one of these days I may actually send out an upgrade or something. (More likely I'll sell your name and address to one of those horrid companies that sends you junk mail, if they pay me enough. Maybe not). ...Steve NEWS FLASH: New command line option - If you DONT specify "-C" on the command line, ScreenX will convert colors 1 and 0 into Black and White for the print job - This ensures that something always gets printed. This will screw up anything to do with color, or grey scales, so if you are printing color, specify the -C on the command line. And it's an even 15,000 bytes now!