Hyperion Entertainment Message Boards

Some windows on WB show a drawers' content in iconmode while others, where the icons are less informative then the entries' names, show the contents in textmode.

When in iconmode it is highly convenient and aesthetically correct to have the icons shown in neatly arranged columns and rows. The window can be shrunk or enlarged to add positively to the experience. And all can be snapshot so position and size remain unchanged over time. This is great and currently requires little enhencement.

How different is it when a window is in text mode: height and size are reflecting the values belonging to iconmode, which gives a wrong result. Invariably, when in textmode, windows need to be vertically organised, whilst when in iconmode a window can have any desired size and look.

Suggestion: when a window is shown in textmode its width should be autoadjusted and its height should be sufficient to hold all entries, eventually up to the screen's bottomedge. Topedge and leftedge should remain the same as when in iconmode.

The Workbench prefs editor should reflect this in tab 'Text mode', tab 'Options':
Addition of a checkbox with suggested label 'Autoadjust width'. (default checked, unchecked is width as when in iconmode)
Addition of a checkbox with suggested label 'Autoadjust height'. (default checked, unchecked is height as when in iconmode)
Addition of a checkbox with suggested label 'Always show all entries'. (default unchecked)


I came to this when I realized I am constantly resizing windows when temporarily changing from iconmode to textmode.

OldFart

@OldFart
Just use Filer instead

@OldFart

When in iconmode it is highly convenient and aesthetically correct to have the icons shown in neatly arranged columns and rows. The window can be shrunk or enlarged to add positively to the experience. And all can be snapshot so position and size remain unchanged over time. This is great and currently requires little enhencement.

I, on the contrary, believe there is great room for improvement in this particular area.

Snapshotting icons onto absolute positions may have been a good idea in the past, when you rarely changed your Workbench screen resolution (most people used 640x256). But today the feature is rather counter-productive. Each time you change the screenmode (you bought a new graphics card; you changed your monitor; you have brought your harddisk to a friend with a different display setup...), the neat arrangement of your icons is gone and you have to go through the hassle of re-adjusting and re-snapshotting all directory windows on your system. This is not what I expect of a modern OS desktop environment.

So what if you did not have to mess around with that stuff at all, unless you
wanted to.

One of the nicest features they came up with is being able to mouse click in
the workbench window area and the menu allows you to get where you want to go
in the system partition.

What if;

This functionality was expanded to include any 'selected' disk partition.

Add 2 items to the .info for...er...OnMenu, and OffMenu. Similar to LeaveOut,
PutAway.

If System, or no partition, is selected then it defaults to System.

trixie wrote:Snapshotting icons onto absolute positions may have been a good idea in the past, when you rarely changed your Workbench screen resolution (most people used 640x256). But today the feature is rather counter-productive. Each time you change the screenmode (you bought a new graphics card; you changed your monitor; you have brought your harddisk to a friend with a different display setup...), the neat arrangement of your icons is gone and you have to go through the hassle of re-adjusting and re-snapshotting all directory windows on your system. This is not what I expect of a modern OS desktop environment.

I don't see too much issue with changing screenmodes.

However, if the icon scaling is being used, the "absolute" positions should be scaled too. Otherwise you can snapshot icons with the scaling at 10% (or whatever), then if the scaling is pushed back up to 100% all the icons are overlapping.

This is particulary bad when archiving a drawer to upload for other people to use.