On Fri 01 Oct, JArchibald@aol.com wrote:
--> 10/1/99 4:40:42 AM EDT, apeluso@peg.it --> << I'd like my image to look more similar to my Mac Finder >>
I want to ask the general question here: ... For _any_ environment, even Windoze, what is needed to cause separate execution (within the containing OS environment) of a selected executable from the file system? If you can make, say, FileList add a menu point to execute the selected file, then basically you have a Finder, ... right? All you need to add are definition of the environment, parameters, etc. Then you can roll your own user interface to fit a desired Look and Feel. Again, right?
Within the limited scope of 'how to launch a program from my app', most OSs allow you to somehow spawn a process to execute a command.IIRC you can call DosExec or something like it from windows and pass a string that will then get treated as a command. Thus DosExec("c:/foo/bar/bilbo.exe") would run the bilbo program. I'm sure there are lots of details that differ between platforms. So yes, it should be relatively simple to roll your own Finder/Exploder/DirBrowser/whatever.
tim
Well, it should be easy to create some sort of file manager, but integrating all of the other stuff that makes up a look and feel of a GUI operating system as we know it is kind of hard. For example, Microsoft has at least three ways of assigning icons to files, all slightly different. Choosing the correct icon and asking the system for it is hard. Doing things like DnD between the operating system stuff and your squeak image is also somewhat challenging. So, yes, it's easy to make a better filelist, but it's harder to do exactly what you want.
DnD! I wonder if we can get minimal COM support for WinSqueak so that we can have this functionality?
-----Original Message----- From: Tim Rowledge [mailto:rowledge@interval.com] Sent: Friday, October 01, 1999 1:06 PM To: Squeak mailinglist Subject: Re: Look and feel
So yes, it should be relatively simple to roll your own Finder/Exploder/DirBrowser/whatever.
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