On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, C. Keith Ray wrote:

> If it possible to Copy/Paste Morphs within squeak, it should be
> possible to copy a Morph, paste it into Apple Scrapbook, quit Squeak.
> Run Squeak again, copy the Morph from the Apple Scrapbook and paste it
> back into Squeak. (Or copy to/from two concurrently running versions
> of Squeak.)
> 
> In this example, Squeak should write to the clipboard its "native
> format" and a PICT representation and possibly a text representation.
> A paint program would accept the PICT representation from the
> clipboard, a text editor would accept the text representation, and the
> Apple Scrapbook would accept all three representations (but only
> display the PICT representation).

Do Mac apps really provide all possible formats just in case? In Unix,
when a copy is issued, the available formats are advertised. The pasting
app decides which representation it wants, and the copying app generates
it on-the-fly. Note that there is no "clipboard" involved, the apps
communicate in peer-to-peer style.

> When reading from the clipboard, Squeak would first look for its
> "native format", then the PICT format, and then the text format.
> 
> Handling drag-and-drop of various types (including filetype 'clpt'
> creator 'drag') would involve some of the same code... the clipboard
> formats should be used when dragging from Squeak to the Finder
> desktop.

Someone would have to come up with a nice x-platform primitive API for
that stuff. Andreas' drop primitives via mime types sound like a good
solution. But pasting/dropping is way easier to implement than
dragging/copying (at least in X).

-- Bert