Problem: Why is Birdie running off with my memory?

Solution: The two files I use for Birdie's patterns, the active and inactive pictures consumes about 2.5 mb of RAM each. (You get the idea of by saving an image in ImageFX as an uncompressed ilbm.) Since I use the NOLIGHTING parameter, I get away easy by losing those five megs. But by default, Birdie will take two copies of both images, one to make a darker version and another to make a lighter version. In other terms, you'll lose an extra ten megs to achieve the extra 3D effect. One method of saving memory is to use one image instead of two. I guess most would pick the Active screen to represent both the active and inactive window, and some might even prefer this way of telling the two apart (The inactive windows have much darker gadgets and window title). By the way, if you are testing out Birdie using the shell (as opposed to the third party MUI interface called BPrefs), remember to break the previous Birdie task before running the program again, unless you have a desire to spend all your memory. I've tried to make my Birdie screens independant of this ram-expensive feature, but I admit that there have been times where I could not immediately find the scrollbar in a DOpus' window. But until someone comes up with a better solution, I can't afford to sacrifice the ten.

Problem: My system doesn't show all the colours of your icons, despite that I use a 24-bit screen.

Original: Remapped:

Groan: I know. I know. It's a shame, but as far as I know, only Scalos is able to display icons without that nasty remapping. I don't know exactly how Scalos is able to do that, it's not normal. The authors of DOpus are not very keen on guessing their way with newicon.library, so I guess there's no point complaining unless you come up with a solution. I haven't tried OS3.5, though, but I assume that it as well walks the dark path of remapping.

Problem: When I use Birdie together with VisualPrefs, the areas between the top gadgets and the window title becomes patternless.

Example:

Solution: Configure VisualPrefs to use the standard color for "Inactive Fill" (pen 0, the first colour in the palette), and the same goes for "Background" (also pen 0). If you leave "Don't optimize border rendering" unchecked (the last entry in the "Options for frames and windows" listview), you will have to make "Fill" use pen 3. In the beta release of VisualPrefs 1.5c, the author claims to have fixed both of these bugs.

Problem: When I try to use your gadgets, they look trashed. In fact, all gadgets become corrupted if I use gadgets with depths above 4 bitplanes.

Solution: This bug has not occured on my system, which uses Picasso96. I am tempted to use CyberGraphics so I can once again get transparant icons and filenames when dragging them, but P96 runs so much faster on my PicassoIV that I had to let it go. Anyway, I've only heard about this problem from CyberGraphics users, so try experimenting with with different picture.datatypes. In case you should wonder, i use the P96 datatype, version 43.41.

Problem: I really like the Dashboard projects, and would like to do the same kind of thing... but I can't use Executive... and I don't know why: When the WB loads it appears to freeze... that's all.

Solution: It's been a long time since I installed Executive on my system, and it's been very good to me. But I wasn't really that interested in its inner workings, I just wanted to use Dashboard. I configured it so it would keep its hands off most of my programs, and offered this prefs file for download. A friend of mine, Chavez, made it painfully obvious to me that my prefs was no good, perhaps especially since it didn't make use of Executive perhaps most desired feature, the feedback scheduler. So I am now using myself, and offering you, his prefs file.