Startup image

Phil Hudson phil.hudson at iname.com
Fri Sep 26 05:32:47 UTC 2003


(One of a flurry of newbie q's I'll be posting over the next couple of days)

I'd like to make a suggestion about how Squeak starts up. Here's the
current Squeak behavior on MacOS X: if you launch the app itself, you get
prompted with a file-open dialog to open an image file, even if you have
previously chosen an image file. This behavior strikes me as A Dumb Thing
and not the way any app should run on the Mac - or any platform, but you
know what I mean.

This obviously doesn't apply if you launch an image file instead of the
app. I do have a reason to want smarter default behavior of the app-on-
its-own-launch though: I use LaunchBar, which can launch any app
installed in response to one or two keystrokes, but which has to be
manually configured to launch unknown file types like image files.

Here's the behavior I would like to see, on all platforms. (It may be
that we already have it and I just don't know it): 

o Squeak should somehow store the pathname of the image file it last used
and always re-load that image on startup, unless and until the user
launches some other image file.

o If no image file preference has yet been stored, Squeak should by
default look for and, if found, open an image file with a standard name
in a standard location. Say, "squeak.image" in the same directory as the app.

o Launching an image file rather than the app on its own should continue
to work as it does now.



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