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      A window iconifier by Thorsten Stocksmeier


DISCLAIMER: ICONWIN IS IN EARLY RELEASE STATE, IN FACT IT'S
ONLY ABOUT ONE HOUR OLD. THE AUTHOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR
ANY DAMAGE OR LOSS OF DATA OR WHATEVER CAUSED BY IT. ANYONE
USES IT WITHOUT WARRANTY.

ICONWIN IS EMAILWARE! I DO NOT REQUEST ANY MONEY OR OTHER
STUFF FOR IT, JUST SOME FEEDBACK IF YOU LIKE IT AND WOULD
LIKE TO SEE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.

Introduction

    While working on my Amiga I found it is very annoying
    having a lot of windows on a screen if you don't need
    them all at the same time.

    Other operating systems (and also MUI programs) offer
    an iconify gadget. This means if you click it, the
    window will be closed and an icon will appear.

    Well, the problem with windows that don't support
    iconification is their parent programs will crash
    immediately after you try to force them to close
    (for example with a system monitor)

    Until now it was not possible to iconify programs that
    didn't support it at all. Well, until now :)

    My (wonderful ;-) idea goes another way. Windows are
    not closed but sized to a single dot and pushed to
    the upper left of their screen. You won't see them
    any more, although their parent programs may draw
    gadgets or refresh the contents. This is possible
    because layers.library will avoid any writing out
    of the window's bounds.

    With this routine, IconWin can iconify *any* window!
    (keep an eye on the known problems, though ;-)

Installation

    You need some kind of hotkey utility. FKey (supplied
    with your system disks) does quite a good job.

    Configure it, so IconWin will be called e.g. at a
    press to F10...

    NOTE: IconWin will iconify the active window, so
    it doesn't help you calling it within a shell
    window ;-)

Cool stuff

    Things that are nice to iconify:

    - workbench windows (reloading takes so much time :)

    - preferences

    - CD players

    - shareware reques... oops ;)

Known problems

    - In general, wild iconification seems to be a good way
      of taking your machine to India. You should not overdo
      it...

    - JABA's BGUI gadget layout system seems to be absolutely
      incompatible with IconWin. You will get very very bad
      system crashes if you try to iconify such a window.

    - Programs that don't care about refreshing their
      Gadtools interface very much will have small problems,
      listviews may be "empty" (they aren't really empty,
      but their contents aren't shown at first), gadgets
      may be lost etc.  But those are minor problems, and
      you'll see where you should iconify and where not.

    - SnoopDos doesn't allow iconifying as it tries to
      layout its GUI to the 1 pixel window.

    - Never close an iconified window! If you then press
      on the icon you'll get bad crashes.

    - IconWin will refuse to iconify your workbench. Your
      turn to guess why ;-)

Future features

    - specifying an icon file to be used

    - check for closed iconified windows

The author

    Thorsten Stocksmeier

    EMail: flavour@teuto.de
    IRC  : flavour on #amigager/#amiga