#MagicWB observations
All,
just a few observations concerning MagicWB (Magic.lzh). The update
went very smoothly, but I thought I should drop some tips here after my
long update session. Since I'm using an A2000/3001, I think that most of
what follows will help those with similiarly limited (chipmem-wise)
machines.
First off, if you don't have Find (by Larry Phillips) I highly
recommend that you get it. The same applies to some type of disk
reorganizer. The former will allow you to find your icon files which will
require updates while the latter will speed up the rendering of icons
whenever you open a drawer.
Make no mistake, MagicWB _will_ load down any machine that doesn't have
the 32 bit wide chip ram, which should be no suprise to those that have
had an eight-color workbench for a while. On the other hand, it is easily
worth the small degradation in speed. So far, the degradation amounts to
about 5-10% here, but your mileage may vary <g>.
There is also one more slight problem related to the eight-color
workbench and that has to do with large drawers. I don't know about you,
but I've collected quite a collection of programs in my C: directory
(which have icons on my system) as well as a far larger collection of
document files in my Docs: directory. Normally, having extremely large
directories in either case would not be a problem, but remember, you are
increasing the amount of chip ram to render these icons by 50% at least.
I ran into a brick wall, since I have only 1 MB of chip ram, when I
attempted to open these two drawers. I had 181 files in my C: directory
and watched while my chip ram dropped to 160 bytes (not kilo-bytes)
whenever I opened the drawer. If you are serious about using MagicWB, you
may have to break up some of your huge directories, if you have any, so
that you don't drive your chip-ram into the dirt.
For those that are not aware of it, there is a way to have multiple
directories that are treated exactly as if the files assigned were all in
the same directory. These directories are 'assigned' with multiple paths.
This is a feature in 2.04+ and should be investigated if you have 75+
files in the same directory. Simply split them up and use a multiple path
assign to "treat" them as one directory.
Another problem that I encountered is that I have document files spread
across my system as well as the usual copies in various sub-directories.
Larry Phillip's Find program helped considerably in unifying the icons
that I want for all doc, iff, and other format files. Find is quite
capable of outputting all files that match a certain criteria to a file
(using I/O redirection). It is a fairly simple matter to edit the output
file into a script. You could conceivably use List with the LFormat
parameter to do the same, but I found this tedious since it did not handle
multiple devices easily. It was far easier to use find redirected to a
file, edit that file so that it did whatever to the files, and then
execute it (or source it for those of you with Csh). As a direct result
of this approach, for the first time every loving document and picture on
my system has the appropriate project icon!
There was one problem that I ran into for which I have not established
a fix. When you are updating drawers using MagicWB's script, it will not
do anything with any drawer that contains a blank within the name. I did
wade into the AmigaDOS 2.1 manual, but no clues as to the fix for the
script were there. I don't know what to do with this problem except to
ensure that I never use blanks in names again.
Another problem I ran into with drawers was that some drawers were not
updated by the script. The script has two problems with it, more to do
with the user than the script writer. If you have a drawer that is empty,
i.e. the icon is there but not the directory, the icon will not be
updated. I suggest deleting them if you can. Secondly, several drawers
on my system had the execute flag unset. I have no idea why the authors
of the programs involved decided to set the execute flag to null for these
drawers, but the plain fact of the matter is that the "Update Drawers"
script will not update the icons for these drawers. I firmly suggest that
you write a simple script (using List LFORMAT or a Csh or ARexx script) to
update all drawers to include the "rwed" flags, otherwise you will
probably have a mix of drawer icons on your system.
Another suggestion. Before you even begin the installation, I highly
suggest you go through each of the MagicWB drawers, select the icons, and
use the unsnapshot menu-item in the WB menus. Again, this will save you
wear and tear down the road when dealing with multiple icons, let alone
the contents of each drawer.
The last suggestion that I have is that you keep copies of the icons
you think you will need to use to overwrite your current icon pictures in
a readily accessible place. I'm using envarc:sys/ here, but a single
drawer on your sys: disk should work better. This way when you de-archive
a file, you can overwrite the icons that the programmer supplied with the
MagicWB icons, appropriately tailored using the WB information menu item,
for your installation.
Anyway, I hope this helps some people with the installation as it is a
quite radical change from the usual run of the mill icons.
Brian