Short: Quick and Easy Screen Switching. V1.31 Author: Kristian Hesketh (kristiangk@aol.com) Uploader: Angus Manwaring (angus@angusm.demon.co.uk) Type: util/wb Version: 1.31 ScreenSwitch v1.31 ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ · Much faster than any other switching program! · Simple and instinctive switching routines. · Fixed Gfx Card Support. · Mouse Centering. · Variable Switching Area. · Commodity. · Small 16k program. · Low CPU usage. Function ­­­­­­­­ 1. Double-Click the ScreenSwitch program icon. 2. Open up more than one screen. 3. Now simply shove the mouse into the top right hand corner of the screen to switch to the next. Easy and simple. Just run it and try it. It's far quicker than all the other ways of switching I have seen and it should work with all the resolutions that you throw at it. · Mouse Centering - The program will now automatically centre your mouse pointer when the program starts. · Variable Area - You can decide the size of the screen switching area. · Commodity - ScreenSwitch is now a commodity. I recommend installing MCP and enabling the ScreenActivation patch. It makes usage of this program nicer by activating the next screen instantly. Tooltypes ­­­­­­­­­ The ScreenSwitch icon has five tooltypes so you can configure the program. The are all turned off with the DEFAULT VALUES shown. If you attempt to give 0 as a value for the tooltypes the program will use the default values. CENTRE=OFF - Disables Mouse Centering. SCREENX=?? - Width in pixels (from right) of area used for switching. SCREENY=?? - Height in pixels (from top) of area used for switching. SWITCHDELAY=?? - Changes the reaction speed of the program. The switch delay is measured in 50th's of a second and higher values slow the reaction speed of the program. This feature is useful to those who use a screen size larger than their display size. A higher value will give them enough time to scroll around their screen without switching. e.g. SWITCHDELAY=50 This will give a delay of around a second between the mouse entering the switching area and the switch being made. This means you can quickly pull the mouse out if you did not mean to switch screens. QUITDELAY=?? - Changes the time before the quit requestor appears. The standard setting of 3 means that after 3 seconds of the mouse being in the top left hand corner the quit requestor pops up. PROPORTION=ON - Modifies the effect SCREENX and SCREENY have. If you chose a switching area of 10x10 pixels on a PAL HiresLaced screen and switched to a PAL Lores Screen the switching area would automatically reduced to 5x5 as the screen is twice as small. The switching area would take up exactly the same physical area on your monitor with PROPORTION=ON. If you switched from Hires to Lores without PROPORTION=ON the swicthing area would be twice as large on the lores screen. Although the number of pixels is now lower the physical switching area is exactly the same as the screen is smaller. It is much easier than it sounds :) Proportion is very useful if you use a larger switching area. If you use a small swicthing area it is better without. Try them both. Installation ­­­­­­­­­­­­ For a more permanent installation, simply copy the program to your WBStartup drawer. Exiting ­­­­­­­ There are two ways of exiting ScreenSwitch: · As ScreenSwitch is now a commodity, you can load up Exchange or a similar program to shut it down or just disable it temporarily. · Holding the mouse in the top left hand corner for a specified number of seconds (QUITDELAY) brings up a requester, which you can quit from. Background ­­­­­­­­­­ Switching between screens on the Amiga usually requires a nasty hotkey combination of LAmiga and M or physically clicking the icon in the top righthand corner of the screen. Some screens do not even have the icon, so it can be hard work. It is nicer on the PC with ALT and TAB and there are many patches for the Amiga to make it "easier" to do it. I had a browse through and most of them just opened an ugly window under the mouse pointer which you then had to click on. This takes longer than stretching for the key combination. :( All I wanted was a program that would make it easier and quicker to switch screens. ScreenSwitch was born. Having been messing around with Blitz2 for ages and ages without having come out with one useful program, it was quite a surprise. Originally it was a nasty little program that had to been run every time you needed to switch screens, but by v1.2 it had become a fully-fledged useful program. I use it all the time. Problems ­­­­­­­­ ScreenSwitch should work with all resolutions now. If you use a screen size larger than your display area increase the SWITCHDELAY value to give you enough time to scroll the screen. If you use a screen resolution of 640x256 then the mouse centering is not perfect. I have no idea why and I can't fix it. It almost centres though... If you use Executive and the program it a bit sluggish sometimes, just don't schedule it. It hardly uses CPU time anyway. Executive is a great program!! There really shouldn't be any problems :) Have you found new bugs? Have you thought of a nice new feature? Please mail me about the program. History ­­­­­­­ v1.0 ScreenSwitch is a small tool which switches the screens when called. It grinds the HD every single time you wish to switch. Grrr.... WBFind is also included which works in the same way, but just brings the workbench screen to the front. v1.1 ScreenSwitch and WBFind are brought toghether into one program. CLI parameters inform the program which one is launched. v1.2 Program redesigned. Now stays in memory and waits for the mouse to move into the corner. Quit feature included. WBFind removed from package. v1.21 CPU usage reduced from 100% to around 0.3%. v1.22 Improvements to screen switching routines. Small bugfixes. Gfx Card Support added. v1.23 Gfx Card Support optimized. Should work automatically with all resolutions. Executable size reduced. v1.24 The size of the switching area reduced. Less chance of accidental switching. Executable size reduced by 4 whole bytes. v1.3 Rewritten from scratch. Gfx Card Support !FIXED! Workbench start code and icon added. Will now run from WBStartup. Increased quit delay. Mouse Centering. Variable and Proportional Switching Area. Tooltype Support. Variable quit delay. Variable program reaction speed. Bugfixes. v1.31 Now a commodity. Prevents program running twice. Added a continue option to quit requester. Distribution ­­­­­­­­­­­­ This program is butterware - Please spread it everywhere. Thanks ­­­­­­ · Angus Manwering for uploading and for the Amiga Games Database. · Gareth Griffiths for help with commodity support. · Ignaz Kellerer for super detailed bug testing. · Salvador Gomez for bug reports. · Wolfgang Krause for big bug reports. · Michal Skotniczny for comments. · Ken Gregory for comments and for loving the program :) · Jean-Francois Fabre for JST and HDInstallers galore. · Petri Nordlund for Executive. · AlienDesign for MCP. · Jonathan Potter and GPSoft for DOpus 5.82. · All the great Amiga magazines for keeping the faith. · Bill and Fleecy for the AmigaNG (Please). · Inspiration for the idea behind this program. · The Amiga and the Aminet for letting it happen :) Dedication ­­­­­­­­­­ This program is dedicated to my cousin, Håvard Søndrol (The Craphead!) who died on 17/03/2000, aged 22, after a fire in his apartment. Development ­­­­­­­­­­­ All work done by [G]NiOB. Coding - Blitz Basic 2. Crunching - StoneCracker v4. If you think that 15k is not a small executable, it IS when you code in Blitz. The executable has been crunched with StoneCracker v4 too ;) A1200T 68060@75Mhz 16Mb RAM 8x CDROM EZ-VGA Mk2 Plus SVGA Monitor [G]NiOB 2000 N.B. It is pronouced Gee-Nee-Ob. You know Genies --> Magic, all that..... And it is Boing backwards. Where do I come up with these things??? Now that you know, I won't bother writing this again. Ever. So there. Okay, this is absolutely the last time........