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2 Configuring MUI

2.1 The Basics

2.11 Window Positions

MUI allows you to postion and re-position your windows and save the position of these windows on demand or everytime you quit the program (or close the window).

For instance, you can use the window border gadget (looks like a triangle going into a rectangle block) to bring down a small menu with a few MUI options. One of these options is to snapshot the current postition of the window.

To save the position of your MUI windows everytime you quit or close the window, go to the windows section within the MUI preferences (type mui:mui from shell) and then change position: to save on exit. Now, everytime you close MUI based window or program the last position of this window will be saved.


2.12 Bubble Help

All NetConnect programs utilise the excellent MUI bubble help feature. If you hold your mouse pointer stationary over certain gadgets, after a few moments a speech bubble will present a short statement of the function of that gadget.

IMAGE: Bubble Help in ActionIMAGE: Controlling Bubble Help

You can control the use of the bubble help within MUI prefs. Within MUI prefs goto the "System" option and then alter the sliders to suit your needs. You can switch off the bubble help by moving both sliders to the left so they are set to zero.


2.13 Setting MUI Application Colours

Many MUI applications use more than 8 colours (which is the normal number of colours used by most Amiga users for their Workbench) which are completely user definable.

A good example of a program that can define pen colours is Microdot-II. This program allows you to set multiple colours for different scenarios. But how do you change the colours when you are using a Workbench running within only 8 colours?

  1. Launch the Microdot-II settings GUI (as described in the Microdot-II documents) then launch the MUI prefs for this GUI.

  2. Change the screenmode to 64 colours. This is described earlier - just select the Voyager screen you created and press USE (ie. so the preferences are not saved).

  3. Now you are back in the Microdot-II settings GUI goto the Colours section. Click on any of the colours you want to change and this little GUI will appear:

    If you goto the RGB colour folder you can select the exact colour you want for each of the colour definables within Microdot-II.

    Do this for every colour you want to edit.

  4. Now got your screenmode settings in Workbench and set your colours to more than 8 (16 or 32 colours are recommended). You might need to run the MWB daemon (part of the MagicWB package), MagicColors or a IPrefs replacement called FastIPrefs (these lock the 8 WB pens so that the MagicWB colours are always fixed).

When you next launch Microdot-II you will now have your colours as you defined within the MUI preferences. Beware that if you run other MUI applications (that use other pen colours) you may find that some of your colours change appearance. This is due to the lack of colours within Workbench.

You can do two things to get around the lack of pen colours within Workbench. Either use Workbench in 64 or 128 colours (but this will be very slow!) or buy yourself a graphics card which will allow you to run Workbench in 256 colours or even 16/24 bit!


2.14 The Interface

As you may have seen within the NetConnect documentation, much of the MUI interface can be altered to suit your needs/desire. You can have multi-coloured backgrounds within your MUI programs to bizarre colour headers within your lists.

To be fair, to describe every configuration in detail would be beyond the scope of this introduction to MUI. We would suggest three things:

Note: that some of these settings will require the full registered version of MUI which was not shipped with NetConnect due to licensing conditions. The registered MUI is never supplied with any commmercial software, a key must be obtained directly from the the SASG web site.


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