**************** * Nikita V1.00 * **************** Nikita Copyright © 1993 Philippe Girolami V1.00 Finished on the 05/30/93 at 2:00 PM. I Notice. -------- This program ("NIKITA") is distributed as shareware. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the object code, the source code and both the french and english documentation are not changed in any manner. You therefore have a moral obligation to send me a contribution which I leave yours to choose. NIKITA needs Release 2 of the Amiga (at least). My adress is: Philippe Girolami 131 Domaine de Suartello 20090 Ajaccio (FRANCE). II The Genesis. -------------- If you have a release 2 Amiga (=500+,1200,4000 etc) you surely know about "public screens", these screens which you can open visiting windows on. Unfortunatly old programs or badly written ones don't open their screens in a public state so you can't have any windows on them. For example, I have written another PD distributed program: "Alarming", it's a watch, calendar with 5 alarms that can be of different type (you choose): daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or a precise date. You do agree that it is not very useful to have the calendar-watch on the workbench screen if you're working on another one (maybe writting your thesis on Final Copy II ?) because it takes just as long to look at your watch than to change screens (especialy if you have many open). So I decided to allow the user to choose on which screen he wanted the watch to be and since it's included in a window this can only be achieved through public screens; that's why programs as Turbo-imploder 4 could not host my program. That's when inspiration came into play: I decided to write a program to make all screens "Public". III Documentation. ----------------- Technical part: NIKITA intercepts calls to intuition's "OpenScreen" and "CloseScreen" fuctions (no, not "OpenScreenTagList" because I believe those who did not open in "public" had a good reason not to). After testing if the screen opens with the CUSTOMSCREEN flag, NIKITA calls "OpenSceenTagList" with the already furnished structure and a Tag; SA_PUbName whose ti_data field points to the name used by the screen. Then NIKITA sets the screen in "PUBLIC STATE" and exits. Why did I intercept "CloseScreen" ? Well, because all these programs don't expect not being able to close their screen (if there's a visiting window) and so they don't test the return code and therefore might leave their screen open (waste of memory). So NIKITA calls "CloseScreen" and tests the return code, if there is an error then NIKITA displays a requester; if not NIKITA does... nothing (!!). Easy part: To install NIKITA, I recommend puuting it in the "WBStartup" drawer of your boot disks or your HD. When NIKITA executes, it will get into memory and attach a item to the "Tools" menu of the workbench (if it's open). Upon selecting it, you will be given a choice: quit, activate, desactivate. "Quit" will flush NIKITA out of memory as though it had never been launched. "Desactivate" will disable NIKITA (for exemple, if you don't want a program to open as "public"). "Activate"... (guess). IV Conclusion. ------------- Beware, most programs don't expect to have visiting windows on their screen so their refreshing capabilities may be bad (ex: MonAm doesn't like it at all Turbo-imploder is bothered by windows on its levels) If NIKITA asks you to close all visiting windows when you try to quit an application, you need to move all these windows to another screen. Don't press "Cancel" unless you have any other choice (ex:Turbo-imploder) because it wastes memory (especially CHIP memory). All in all, I hope you find this program useful and that it's life-span is very short (ddo you understand why ? No ? Write-me!!). Philippe Girolami On the 06/16/93 at 5:21 PM.