Pinboard enhancement

I’m trying to use RISC OS 5 more, but keep coming across things I miss on my RISC OS 6 computers. Today’s missing feature is XPIN

*X Pin is used on RISC OS 5
If the file/directory is not present the command silently fails and no icon appears on the pinboard.

RISC OS 6 has: XPIN
If the pinned item is not available rather than fail silently it puts a square icon with a question mark in it which is more useful than using X Pin

Another related suggestion is to allow a directory to pinned with another name. Say you have two directories called ‘Photos’ one locally and another remotely. You could display one as PhotosPi and another PhotosNAS

I propose:

*help Xpin
==> Help on keyword Pin (Pinboard)
*Pin adds a file, application or directory to the desktop pinboard.
Syntax: *XPin []

e.g.
XPin Share::FS.$.Photos 200 400 PhotosPi

Chris: To clarify you mean RO6 has XPin AND X Pin ;-) (you can still do both depending upon which behaviour you want).

The primary use of XPin is, as you say, with network drives. The key difference is that if a link is unavailable at Boot for example, XPin will remove all dead links. However, you might mount that link later on (even within the Boot sequence) and the purpose of it is therefore to keep the links available so that if the drive becomes available later you can use it without setting up the Pin again or reloading the saved pinboard.

X Pin is so that if when you start up the file doesn’t exist (i.e. it has been deleted or has not been created) the pin is omitted without generating an error.

*x
is in RO5 & RO6
you can *X anything!

From RISC OS 5:
*help x
==> Help on keyword X
*X passes its argument to the command interpreter, storing any error in system variable X$Error (if not already set)
Syntax: *X
*

From RISC OS 6
*help x
==> Help on keyword X (BootCommands)
*X passes its argument to the command interpreter, storing any error in a system variable.
Syntax: *X

==> Help on keyword x (library command)
Command is: X 1.07 (07 Jan 2007)

*X will execute a command without reporting any errors. Any error
will be written to the system variable X$Error if it is unset.
Syntax: *X

n.b. I miss-described the icon used by RISC OS 6. It is a white box with a jagged line across it and a Warning Triangle bottom right like the road sign!