Must... have... more... colours

Anticipating future question…

No, I don’t know¹ why I wrote a module that makes the directory sprite gradually change colour every time it’s plotted.

¹ This is a lie. It was a prototype for a Filer choose-dir-colours feature I went no further with.

Well, it’s kind of awesome nonetheless.

I had similar functionality in Windows XP years ago, as it does help to have landmarks within a sea of (at that time) yellow. Obviously the benefit fades the more coloured directories you have, to the point it just all gets a bit tiring.

I’ve already got badges (right), and individually-configurable directory icon colours are trivial to implement (left), but then the middle one happened…

You could set the alpha value proportional to the object modification time so ancient objects would just fade away…

but then the middle one happened…

It’s very nearly an LGBTQ+ thing isn’t it?
Maybe we should incorporate it as the only available colour marking for users located in Saudi, Qatar…

ancient objects would just fade away…

I’ve never been so insulted.

Oh, you mean my programs? I’ve never been so insulted.

I parked the coloured-directories idea because it obviously begs for filing system metadata (to store your choice with the directory) and that’s something I keep playing with and discarding.

Windows happily uses hidden file(s) to store custom icon choices for a directory, and one could imagine Filer trivially hiding such things (even if GBPB didn’t), but that feels icky compared with ‘proper’ metadata.

Or it could work like ColourFiler and just remember settings independently, but that seems bureaucratic. So I occasionally poke it with a stick but get no further down the logical road.

Not sure what to do with it.

ancient objects would just fade away…

I’ve never been so insulted.

Oh, you mean my programs? I’ve never been so insulted.

RO user base, and I don’t we feel much beyond an inevitability.

Not sure what to do with it.

Poke with a longer, sharper, stick?

I’m not discouraged because I don’t do stuff for you ungrateful buggers, but of all the things I’ve done recently the one I was most excited by was MetaSprite – that was a year ago and I’ve not received a single bit of feedback since.

MenuBadges – nothing.

MenuState – not a sausage.

Seems the fading is well-established.

I’m not discouraged because I don’t do stuff for you ungrateful buggers, but of all the things I’ve done recently the one I was most excited by was MetaSprite – that was a year ago and I’ve not received a single bit of feedback since.

Don’t look at me, that stuff seems to be mostly for programmers and clever people.

So, no programmers then. I’m sure that’ll work out just fine.

Aldershot has been muted by some; it tends to be the place to discuss things that aren’t RISC OS related.

> Andrew looks up from his keyboard, points in the direction of Announcements looks back down at his keyboard. ;)

Aldershot has been muted by some

Their loss.

MetaSprite – good idea, but for what I do with RISC OS I don’t see a use.
That being said, it would be rather nice if something that converted JPEG to sprite was able to copy across the metadata.
I guess the problem is in getting the ball rolling.

MenuBadges – this I actually like. Something like that ought to be a standard part of the OS to help make the menus look like something from this millennium. ;)
Maybe I’ll look into using it in the future. But for now, I’ve not coded anything with a menu structure for quite a while.

MenuState – I have a library (DeskLib) that does all the menu crap. It would be interesting if I was doing low level stuff, but I try not to get bogged down with the tedious bollocks. It’s already enough of a pain to “show a textile in a window”. The sort of stuff that shows how far RISC OS lags behind other UIs.

Don’t feel bad. I’ve released the sources to some of my code. Not a word heard back.
As for my internet radio code, some feedback which amounted to “Thanks for this, I’ve added some cool features”. When I ask about sharing the code (I released it as EUPL), radio silence. Cheers for that.

Oh, and the usual assortment of (don’t want to be seen as racist but it’s mostly Indians) asking me some really simple questions about the ARM processor that I’d bet actual money on being stuff they are being asked in some sort of class. If I reply at all, I tend to tell them I’m not here to do their homework for them. One even had the audacity to offer to pay me (peanuts, in rupees) to write a memory move function. 😡

to write a memory move function

Now they can go cheat with a mixture of StackOverflow and Copilot AI.
And people wonder why so much modern software is really shitty.

I’m not here to do their homework for them.

Yes, I have had students asking me to do their maths homework for them. Full marks for enterprise and chutzpah, but these qualities may well not be consistent with those required for scholarly activity.

You could set the alpha value proportional to the object modification time so ancient objects would just fade away…

Nemo- the way I read it, was that some file objects could be made disappear from view, based on their age, using what you’ve done.

A neat idea. :)

That wasn’t entirely serious, and of course one can always sort by date… but would the ability to temporarily hide things before a particular date be useful? It’s not something that had occurred to me (and I have 3,500 files in some dirs).

It would be easy enough to have “Hide earlier” as a selection menu item… hmmm.

Hide > Selection
       Earlier
       Later
       Filetype
       Other types

Trouble is, someone would want that to ‘stick’, and then we’re back to the directory metadata thing again. Interesting suggestion, Andrew.

I’m not discouraged because I don’t do stuff for you ungrateful buggers, but of all the things I’ve done recently the one I was most excited by was MetaSprite – that was a year ago and I’ve not received a single bit of feedback since.

I’m not on RISC OS at the moment so I’m going to be terrible and give feedback without looking at it first.

MetaSprite is a good idea, but it really needs to be built in to a gaphics application such as DplgScan or Photodesk, which can import foreign formats with metadata and preserve it when saving to a sprite as an intermediate working format, then include it when saving to the final format of JPEG or PNG etc. It would have to be one of these all encompassing graphics programs, as I fear any other RISC OS application which loads and saves sprites will strip out all the information. (The Draw format had scope for metadata as programs were supposed to ignore unknown objects, but that didn’t stop a few of them stripping that out along the way).

MenuBadges looks like a good idea, but it needs to be used well in a major application to gain traction.

I suspect developers have come across the issue MenuState seeks to solve, but its use will depend on how easy it is to replace existing framework code.

Still playing with this but it might be useful

import foreign formats with metadata

Hmm, yes it supports EXIF and XMP as well as tags for Author, Copyright and so on, but I was envisioning more RISC OS specific uses. e.g. it has built-in support for the pointer hot-spot coordinate. I have a LongSpriteNames module that uses it.

But I do tend to look at things from the programmer’s point of view. e.g. Filer might allow custom directory icons by looking for a Path meta inside its sprites, that would specify the full path name. And ‘gama’ is a solution to a perennial problem in RISC OS that is avoided elsewhere by inserting massive ICC profiles into everything, or relying on sRGB and code that gets its sums right.