Re: IIe gui, which is best?

[Randy Shackelford <shack@onyx.southwind.net>]

Stingray <stingray@webzone.net> wrote:

[snip]

: In a futile attempt to make a long story short: I've been playing around
: with Apple II Desktop, but not much software seems to run under that
: particular gui. Is there a better one? Should I just use a program
: launcher? Which one works best on a IIe starting up from a HD?

Nothing runs "under" Apple II Desktop. It's merely a Finder style program
selector which can handle some easy tasks like copying files.

Back when I was writing a lot of assembly code, I wrote myself a homemade
SYS program which I use to boot ProDOS 8 on my //e, and is the only P8
app I ever launch directly from GS/OS. I wrote it to handle the housekeeping
type jobs which I wanted done, plus let me choose what program selector I
use. It has a hidden menu which comes up when you hold cmd-opt at boot,
and you set the following things: connect/disconnect the 5.25 drives,
connect/disconnect the 64K RAM disk, set the create/modified date on the
RAM disk to the current date/time or leave them be if they're already set,
write the boot code to block 0 of the RAM disk, and choose which of two 
different apps would run after the boot app finished. It saves its config-
uration in the AUX_TYPE field of its own file entry, as the ProDOS 8 Tech Ref
says you can do. 

Once configured, it's transparent, taking care of the housekeeping jobs like
disconnecting the 5.25s and 64K RAM disk if so configured, then running the
startup app. I also made a short cut where holding down opt at boot ran the
other of the two apps. One app's path is stored in the SYS program's startup
path buffer. The other was hard coded to be ECP8 (my favorite program selector)
but I had a version where it could be changed with a block editor, as is done
with several of the ProSel utilities. 

I put Apple II Desktop as the alternate app, so when I boot my //e or run
ProDOS 8 on the IIgs, it does its thing and I end up in ECP8, or in Apple
II Desktop if I held opt when it ran. Pretty ingenious if I say so myself.

I think the setting the RAM disk creation date and writing the boot code to
block 0 of the RAM disk are particularly helpful. I even managed to write
a TIF for GS/OS-ProDOS 16 to do that. Got tired of copying files to the RAM 
disk to boot it only to get reminded that the thing isn't bootable if you
don't format it ahead of time or otherwise get the boot code on there.
-- 
Offsite mail to this host gets nuked.