From: don@chopin.udel.edu (Donald R Lloyd)
Subject: Re: Screenshots: Results:
Organization: University of Delaware
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 20:48:01 GMT

das9674@usl.edu (Stephenson Daniel A) writes:
>>
>>     One two-word comment:      Commodities Exchange.
>
>Now, would you please explain to me what this means?

     Nope.


     :-)




     Amiga OSes from 2.0 on use a system called Commodities Exchange as
a standard means of customizing your environment; it's not part of Workbench,
but Workbench benefits quite a bit from it.  Keystrokes, mouse clicks, 
and other system events are passed through CX, where they can be intercepted
by tasks called Commodities.  Commodities are generally small programs 
that are started at boot time, although they can be started, stopped,
or reconfigured at any time.
     The ARQ and ToolManager programs I mentioned are both Commodities.  Others
that I run are a screen blanker, mouse accelerator, iconifier (since AmigaDOS
doesn't provide a standard way to iconify windows, this provides it), 
and one or two others I can't remember at the moment (I'm on a PC at work).
     These kinds of things were always available before, but until CX came 
along they were for the most part hacks generally died any time there was 
an OS upgrade, or they didn't get along with each other.  CX provides
a system-legal way of doing things as well as a standardized interface
for controlling and configuring them.  (Most Commodities are extremely
configurable in terms of activation hotkeys, etc.).
     Other commodities I've seen include hotkey-macro type programs, 
programs that add new items to the Workbench menus, pop-up-menu systems,
mouse pointer blankers, screen/window shufflers, etc.  


>>     Yeah, there are a lot of ugly ones out there; lots were left over from
>>the 1.3 days.  It also seems like some software developers have some kind
>>of fetish for shipping their products with 250x180 icons, which get replaced
>>almost instantaneously on my system by normal-sized ones.
>
>250X180??  Is that like, the PIXEL DIMENSIONS?!  Ho ho ho, that's a 
>good one.

     Well, I wasn't citing any actual examples, but yes, there are definitely
some really disgustingly huge ones out there, that size and larger. 
I seem to remember seeing a commercial game that, when you opened the window 
on the disk, the window and icon together filled up an entire 640x200 screen.
(Back in the pre-deinterlacer days when most Amigas ran at this resolution).

     The OS Icon editor has a much smaller size limit than this, though :-)


>That's neat.  And in addition to having a virtually total standard
>of 3.5" floppy disk sizes, I consider this sort of thing the second
>Amiga Advantage I've run across.
>

     Now if only we had standard _high density_ 3.5" drives.  I picked up
one of the CBM dual-speeders at the local ComputerLand's going out of
business sale yesterday for 90 bucks, but I would much rather have 
been able to mail-order a PC one and plug it in for a lot less money.



-- 
Don Lloyd                / "No, I just think that a computer grafted on top of \
don@chopin.udel.edu      | another computer is a kludge.  It has nothing to do |
GeNIE: D.LLOYD7          \ with the Intel CPU"  - Jerry Shekhel                /
BIX: DRL  
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy