#POCO Manual?
I agree with all the kudos of POCO. I am BITTERLY disappointed that this
wonderful feature was left entirely out of Animator Studio with no viable
replacement available (gee, you guys could at LEAST have given us some sort of
OLE Automation capabilities that we could call from Visual BASIC or Borland
Delphi or some such!). POCO does have some "holes" in it, though, and it looks
like they will never be filled due to the emphasis shift to AAS. It's just
another example of programmers leaving easily-implemented features out of
something just because THEY couldn't think of a reason any of us would want it.
NEVER do that with a programming tool! The whole purpose of a programming tool
(POCO, IPAS Plug-Ins, etc.) is precisely BECAUSE we out here can often think of
useful things to do with them that the original designers couldn't —
otherwise, they would've just put in all the features into the program to begin
with rather than having people write plug-ins and scripts!
One example in particular: POCO includes the ability to duplicate MOST of
the user-interface commands of Animator Pro. For instance, under the Swap
Screen menu, you can Copy the current Frame to the Swap screen, Paste the Swap
screen to the current Frame, or Exchange the Swap screen and the current Frame.
POCO implements the Copy and Exchange functions but NOT the Paste function.
This meant my FIELDER.POC (in the Library here) is WAY slower than it needs to
be and the user has to be sure the Key color is set to the least-used color in
the whole FLIC for best results, AND has to deal with the fact that my routine
has to trash the current CEL buffer, since I had to use CEL instead of SWAP.
SWAP would have been MUCH better. But there was no Paste Swap facility, even in
1.3. 🙁