Index of /atarilibrary/atari_cd03/UNPACKED/TOOLS/SHELLS/ICON

      Name                    Last modified       Size  Description


[DIR] Parent Directory        11-May-2007 20:53      -  
[   ] BLANK.MIF               14-Sep-1993 00:12     1k  
[TXT] ICON.PRG                14-Sep-1993 00:34    75k  
[   ] STANDARD.MIF            14-Sep-1993 00:22     1k  
[   ] TEST.MIF                14-Sep-1993 00:11     6k  

Thank you for obtaining this software.  Your feedback
very important to me.  I have developed this software
in an attempt to utilize the Atari ST computer as a
MIDI workstation.  It is the product of many hours of
studying the Atari ST architecture, designing, and
implementing a graphical user interface platform.

NOTE: Requires a color monitor, not sure about the
      memory requirements, my ST has 1 Meg.  Please
      turn off any screen savers, as this software
      uses it's own keyboard/mouse routines.

A little history on this software...

It became apparent that the TOS operating system
along with GEM could not properly handle high speed
MIDI communication, along with mouse movement.

So to accomplish 100% accurate real-time recording, I
developed an interrupt handler that could handle MIDI
input at high speeds, and copied the data to a buffer
along with time stamp information.

This allowed me to record MIDI data at virtually any
speed.  For testing, I used a Roland TR505 drum 
machine, cranked up to full tempo, playing a pattern
of 8 drum notes per 16th note.  This caused 8 note-on
and 8 note off messages per 16th, note which
translated to quite a lot of data coming in per
second.

Since I had to revector the level 6 interrupt, and
the ST uses this interrupt level for not only MIDI
but for MOUSE and KEYBOARD events, I could not use
GEM for my graphical user interface.

So I set out to develop a decent graphical user 
interface, taking advantage of the full power of the
Atari ST's graphics power.  Having been exposed to
many windowing systems, I decided to provide a 3D
effect, as demonstrated by the several windowing
systems currently available.

My MIDI sequencer is still under development, and
I developed this icon editor to allow me to create
images that I needed for various "buttons" in the
user interface.

This icon editor was orginally supposed to be a 
small effort, but as it progressed, it pointed out
several "flaws" in my software.  For instance, the
icon editor "work area" is comprised of 800 
"buttons".  This challenged my recursive drawing
routines, as well as the routines that dealt with
maintaining a hierarchial tree of all the items
on the screen.

I have decided to place this early version of my
icon editor application out in the public domain,
in order to help answer many questions that I
have:

    1) What Atari computer systems does it run on?
       (ST, STE, Mega ST, TT, Falcon)

    2) Would Atari enthusiasts consider
       purchasing applications built on top
       of robust graphical user interface
       platform, if one existed?

    3) How many Atari ST fans are still out
       there?

    4) Does it run on a 520ST with one half
       a megabyte of memory?
	
I've owned an Atari ST for roughly 6 years, and
consider it to be a great computer.

If you like what you've seen, or wish to voice
any feedback you have, I strongly urge you to
post a note in the "comp.sys.atari.st" newsgroup
on the internet...

A few known problems:

	I have not yet implemented the dragging
	of the scroll bars within the icon work
	area.  You must click the arrow buttons
	to scroll.

	When scrolling the icon work area, the
	right button uses a prototype horizontal
	scrolling routine I have developed.  When
	scrolling left, all of the squares are
	filled from an in memory icon map.  So
	you will notice that right scrolling is
	much quicker and smoother than left
	scrolling.

	The icon width and icon height can not
	be changed, although the fields accept
	new values.  The .MIF file can be edited
	to resize the icon, but you must add or
	remove the necessary number of characters.
	(T = top shadow, B = background, O = bottom
	shadow, F = foreground, and . = transparent)
	Before I developed this icon editor, I used
	to create all my icons in EMACS this way.

	No bounds checking is done when clicking on
	squares in the icon working area.  So if a
	10 by 10 icon is being edited, clicking outside
	of the 10 by 10 area will lead to undefined
	results.


_John Miskinis_

September 7, 1993