On Monday 12 May 2003 03:04 am, goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:

> > so that we could do
> > 	Imports default viewImages
>
> Sounds reasonable/readable to me if there is no other obvious place
> somewhere. I have never used these - Ned? Anyone else?

These are used in the eToys system to provide a quick way to get to 
various images that you or others may have created and you may want 
to use as (for instance) a costume for a Player. There are some menu 
items that use them.

I haven't used them much, since I don't really like the little 
graphical dictionary browser (it doesn't scale well if you have lots 
of images).

But I do see the sense in being able to have a kind of rich clipboard 
for various media. This would include Morphs, images, sounds, movies, 
etc.

Ideally we'd also have some meta-data about these clips. So, for 
instance, things that get copied to the global Clipboard might appear 
in the Imports for a while (and get expired somehow; perhaps the last 
N clipboard copies would be there, or they'd stay for a few days).

> Have anyone any good ideas about when to use a Global (like
> Transcript) with instance behaviour or when to use a class with
> class side behaviours? I presume that whenever there is an even
> remotely chance that there might be more than *one* of these things
> we should use the Global pattern instead. Right? Or at least a
> singleton pattern like "SMSqueakMap default". So in this respect
> perhaps Imports should be a global pointing to an instance of ...
> well, I can't come up with a good name. Anyone?

I'd prefer to have these pluggable, however it is done. Classes are of 
course just another kind of global.

There's already support in Projects for per-Project preferences, too; 
any Preference (or is it just the flags?) may be marked as 
per-Project.

Some of what we've been discussing (like for instance default UI 
handlers) might properly belong in such a per-Project registry.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE