Prospect - Advanced Window Manager

by Tony Patterson


Mentor is a replacement for Acorn's Pinboard which provides many extra facilities that have been specifically designed to enhance the Risc PC. It does not work on other Acorn machines. It will work on any Risc PC, though it is at its best on a machine with VRAM and a big monitor that allows desktops with large logical work areas in square pixel modes.

Prospect is installed by double-clicking on its installation program ProspIns. This will automatically install the following applications:

ADFS::4.$.Choices.Boot.Tasks.!Prospect
ADFS::4.$.Choices.Boot.PreDesk.!!!!Prosp

and the font Small, which it uses in its virtual window display. If you ever need to de-install the program, then these are the files which should be deleted. Installation takes less than a minute. You should now run the Configure application by double-clicking on ADFS::4.$.!Boot. Click on Windows and ensure that both the icons in the Allow windows off-screen section of the Window manager window are ticked. Once done, Prospect will be available after the next reset.

Prospect offers the following facilities in addition to those provided by Pinboard:

Filer window
Backdrop files are kept in a window available by clicking Adjust on the backdrop, leaving the backdrop uncluttered and allowing you to get at files without moving windows about.

Extended filer options
Help, info, keyboard activators and small icon display are available with the Prospect filer.

Passive treatment of unlocated files
Files in the filer that are stored on removable media or network mounts that are not present at start-up are marked in red in the filer window. Once the media becomes available, clicking Adjust on the backdrop will boot such files as normal.

Auto load at boot
Files can be selected for auto-load immediately the machine is switched on. This allows you to leave your machine to boot and load a DTP package and printer drivers (for example) while you do something more interesting.

Extended sprite display options
Reflected tiles, bricks and zoom patterns, aspect locked scaling and randomly chosen sprite options are available.

Free memory display
An indication of available memory with 'memory low' highlighting is provided.

Auto-caret, auto-raise
Prospect can be set up to automatically give the caret to the window under the pointer or to raise the window under the pointer to the top of the window stack.

Shutdown confirmation
Prospect can be configured to request confirmation of a shutdown to prevent accidents becoming disasters

Icons exist in window stack
Iconised windows are not stuck to the backdrop but can be solid dragged around the Desktop, in front of other windows. They have a title bar as well as back and close icons. The menu of the window which has been iconised is available by just clicking Menu over the work area of the iconised window.

Icon grid-lock
Iconised windows lock on to a grid so that they can be placed accurately when they are dragged around. If you hold down Shift when you drag an icon, the grid is over-ridden and the icon travels smoothly to allow delicate positioning.

Icon gravity
Iconised windows will travel to any desired window edge rather than being dropped behind the close icon of the window they represent. Subsequently iconised windows are arranged in a line along that edge of the screen.

Colour configuration
All colours are user-configurable using the Risc PC colour selector if it is available.

Virtual Window Display
This window, shows an area equivalent to six entire screens at the top left of the screen. All open windows are shown on this display where they may be dragged around to other screens which may also be visited.

Tools window
This window allows you to bring other windows to the front or put them to the back even when their window tools aren't visible. It also allows you to make windows sticky or unsticky. Sticky windows are stuck to the screen so that they stay with you while you travel around the virtual desktop.

Options saved to file
All options and files in the Prospect filer are saved internally allowing easy permanent configuration alterations.

Prospect does not provide a replacement for TinyDirs.

After installing Prospect and resetting your machine, it will have been loaded and is ready for use. The backdrop menu displays the following choices:

Info
Show program information.

Options
Open the options window. When first opened, it displays the options that were last saved which are not necessarily those currently in force.

Tools
Open the Tools window.

Backdrop
Display or hide the backdrop sprite. When this option is ticked, the backdrop sprite is displayed. Hiding the backdrop allows you to reclaim the memory that it is using when memory s short.

Quit
Quit Prospect. It is unlikely that you will want to do this.

The Tools Window
The Tools window has four icons, from the top left these are back, front, stick and unstick. They are activated by clicking on the required icon with Select and holding it down. This causes the pointer to change to a question mark with an arrow at the bottom. This pointer should be dragged so that the arrow points at the target window. The required action will be performed when the mouse button is released.

Virtual Window Display
This window is opened by clicking Select on the backdrop. It shows six virtual screens and all open windows in their positions on those screens. The window can be closed by clicking Menu over it. The virtual windows can be dragged around with Select, causing the real window to move correspondingly. Windows can be dragged to other virtual screens and you can visit another screen by double-clicking on it. If you double-click Adjust, the VWD will be closed at the same time. This allows you to organise your windows with those relevant to particular tasks on the different screens. You can then switch between the tasks by visiting the various screens.

Filer Window
The Filer Window is a store of file aliases in the same way that Pinboard's backdrop is. It is opened by clicking Adjust on the backdrop. It behaves in a similar way to normal Filer windows but with a slightly simpler menu:

Display
This allows you to over-ride the configured display options to show either Small icons or Large icons.

File->Help
Loads the help file of an application but does nothing for ordinary directories. If it is a file, the command
     @HelpType_XXX
is executed where XXX is the file's type. Aliasing this command allows an application to be run when help is sought on a file.

File->Open parent
This opens the Directory Display from which each of the selected files originated.

File->Activator
This leads to a dialogue which can be used to select a key or None for no key which is associated with the named file. By pressing Ctrl-Shift-F12 and then one of the letter keys, all files, applications and directories with that letter set up as the active key will be run. This key is also used by the Prospect Autostart program.

File->Remove
This removes an alias from the Prospect Filer.

Save Changes
This makes the current selection of files and their associated active keys permanent so that the next time you boot your computer they will all be available.

The Prospect Filer boots applications in the background so that you get control of your machine sooner after booting it. To really speed things up, you can remove any Filer_Boot lines from your      ADFS::HardDisc4.$.!Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks.!Boot
file that boot those applications that you have aliased in the Prospect Filer.

Occasionally you will see files in the Prospect Filer that have no icon and whose name is in red. These represent files that have been renamed, deleted or are on removable media or network mounts that your machine has been unable to access. In the latter case, mounting the required media and clicking Adjust on the backdrop will boot those files though you can, of course, leave them unbooted if you do not need to use them.

Options Window
This window opens displaying the options that will be in force when the computer is next booted. These are not necessarily the currently selected options. There are three buttons at the right-hand side of the window being:

Save
Save the options. The selected options will be enforced immediately and saved for the next time the machine is booted.

Cancel
Close the window with no further action

Set
Set the options immediately but do not save them for future use.

The left-hand side of the window is a scrolling pane which can, if necessary, be enlarged to full size. It is divided into sections related to particular parts of the program:

Backdrop
Dragging a sprite file or directory to the load target inserts the file's or directory's name in the adjacent field. If the icon above that field is ticked, then the sprite in that file will be displayed on the backdrop. If a directory was dropped onto the load target then a file will be chosen from it at random each time that Prospect is loaded. The directory should therefore contain nothing but sprite files and should have at least on file in it. There are nine different methods available for displaying the sprite which can be chosen from the Sprite display method menu. The colours of the backdrop and any drawing done on it can be set by clicking on the Background and Foreground icons.

Virtual field window
The colours used by the VFW can be set up here.

Iconised windows
The background colour of iconised windows can be set up here, also the side to which icons migrate can be set by clicking the appropriate radio button. Icons migrating to the bottom edge actually end up just above the icon bar, not obscuring it.

Filer
This allows you to permanently configure the size of the icons used in the Prospect Filer.

Memory display
The free memory display can be configured here. It can be turned off altogether or it can be switched to display on either the left or right-hand side of the screens. The Danger level can be set at any multiple of 4K between 0K and 1020K inclusive. Whenever the free memory in the system is less than or equal to the danger level, the memory display is shown in red.

Miscellaneous
This allows you to switch on:

Auto raise: where every window over which the pointer is moved is brought to the front immediately.

Auto caret: where every window over which the pointer is moved is given the input focus immediately.

Zoom boxes: where when a window is iconised an animation shows the transformation from window to icon and vice versa. There are two different styles of zoom boxes, lines and rectangles which can be selected with the radio buttons to the right.

Shutdown
Select this item to make Prospect request confirmation of an impending shutdown.


Note that due to a bug present in AudioWorks and in MineHunt in the RiscPC Diversions directory, Prospect cannot be loaded when either of these programs is running. If they are loaded after prospect, there is no problem. Also, the current version of Prospect cannot be used at the same time as Eesox' CDFast.


 Copyright RISC User, 1995
