Desktop Textures Installer Help Description Use the Desktop Textures Installer to install textures on your Macintosh desktop. The Installer performs the same task as the "General" Control Panel's desktop pattern selector, but acts more like a texture scrapbook, and doesn't impose any limits on the number of colors or size of the patterns. Terminology With the General Control Panel, you can select from several patterns (or edit them) to be displayed on your Macintosh desktop. However, this simple control panel can only manipulate patterns that are exactly eight pixels by eight pixels in size and are composed of exactly 8 colors. The Desktop Textures Installer allows you to surpass these limits. We have included many patterns which you can select to be displayed on your desktop. The patterns we provide are actually more like textures, and we will use that term to refer both to our patterns and the ones you can create using this program. We will also suggest sources of additional patterns. On-Line Help Three forms of on-line help are available with the Desktop Textures Installer. "Quick Help" is available by pressing the "Help..." button in the Texture Picker dialog. This help window is available through the "Texture Installer Help" menu item in the Apple menu or the System 7 Balloon Help menu. Finally, if you turn on Help Balloons in System 7, helpful balloons will appear guiding you through the Texture Picker and the menus of the Installer. Basic Operation Texture Picker When you start the program, the Texture Picker dialog opens. You use this dialog to select, preview, and install textures. Press the right or left arrows to advance or retreat through the textures, which will be displayed in the preview box in the middle of the dialog. To preview the texture on your Macintosh desktop, click the mouse within this preview box. The texture will be displayed on your desktop, but it will not be installed; if you quit the program now, your old desktop pattern will reappear. To install a texture on your desktop, click the Install button. From the point you press this button until you install another texture, this texture will be your desktop pattern. There are keyboard equivalents for each of these operations. The right and left arrow keys advance and retreat through textures. Press the Space Bar to preview the texture on your desktop. Press Return or Enter to install the texture. In addition, if you hold the Option key while advancing or retreating, the texture will be previewed on your desktop automatically. If you advance past the last texture or retreat past the first, you will wrap around to the first or last texture, respectively. Review the Quick Help dialog for a concise description of these controls. The Quick Help dialog is evoked by pressing the Help button of the Texture Picker dialog. Texture Menu Instead of using the arrows to select textures, you can use the Texture Menu. This menu contains (among other items) a list of all the textures. If you hold down the Option key while you select a texture in this manner, it will be automatically previewed on your desktop. Texture Resource Files A major enhancement in version 2.0 is the ability to open Texture Resource Files. These files (several of which are included) contain more textures. Open one using the Open... menu item or double clicking it in the Finder. Under System 7, you may also drag texture files onto the Desktop Textures Installer. When you want to open another texture file and you already have one open, you must close it first. The Installer can only open one texture file at a time. (Under System 7, there is no need to close one resource file before opening another from within the Finder; the Installer will automatically close the first file in that case.) You may open any file containing resources (including applications) by holding down the Option key while you select the Open... menu item. You can create new texture files with the New... menu item. You can then add your own textures or reorganize your texture collection. Going Back to the Old Way Once you install one of our textures, the General Control Panel will cease to recognize the desktop pattern in the System Folder as valid. If at any time you decide to return to the General Control Panel's interface (and accompanying small textures) simply install the plain gray texture titled "Control Panel Compatible." Advanced Operation Texture Info The Show Texture Info menu item displays a small window describing the size of and number of colors in the selected texture. It also suggests the Monitors Control Panel settings for which the texture will be displayed properly. This is a partial workaround for a particular system limitation, described below. Cut and Paste When you make modifications to Texture Resource Files, you are modifying the files themselves, not images of the files in memory. You will never see a dialog asking if you want to save changes when you close a file; the changes are saved immediately when you Cut or Paste. With that in mind, you can create textures as described below. In a manner similar to using the Scrapbook, you can Cut and Paste textures between texture files. The Copy menu item copies the currently selected texture to the clipboard, and the Paste menu item pastes the clipboard contents into the currently open texture file. Cut and Clear work as expected. Warning: These operations cannot be undone. (You cannot Cut or Clear textures from or paste textures into the supplied resource files or the installer application itself. You may copy these textures and paste them into other texture files or documents within other programs.) With the help of these editing commands, you can create your own desktop textures. Use another program, such as a paint program, to create the texture image. Then, copy this image to the Clipboard. Bring the Desktop Textures Installer to the front, open the desired texture file, and select Paste. Any PICT image can be pasted into the Installer as a desktop pattern. There are two major limitations to the size of a texture. Desktop patterns must have each dimension an integral power of two. The Desktop Textures Installer allows you to create textures as small as eight by eight pixels. This means that the horizontal and vertical dimensions may be any combination of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. pixels. The second limitation is that the Apple Systems Engineers did not expect very large pattern to be used on the desktop, and so ignored an "undocumented feature" which limits the size of desktop patterns depending on the number of colors your monitor is set to display. Warnings are displayed when you try to create very large textures, which you may either heed or dismiss. You can disable these warnings by using the "Warn on Paste" menu item. By default, the Installer will stretch the texture in each dimension independently to the next largest power-of-two size if the PICT you paste does not meet the above requirement. Alternatively, you may use the "Crop on Paste" menu item to cause the Installer to crop the PICT to the next smaller size (again, both dimensions independently) if not already appropriate. No stretching of the image will occur. By default, when you Paste a texture, the program will scan the image to determine how many colors it contains. It will then generate a texture of the minimum size containing that many colors. However, you can force the program to generate "direct-mapped" images. Textures generated in this way do not contain a separate color table (as normal "indexed" images do) but instead store the colors within the image data itself. The advantage of direct images is that they can be dithered when displayed on your screen. That way, the image will look as close to the original as possible even at low monitor depth settings. To create optimally sized textures, select the "Optimize For Size" item in the Edit menu. To create direct-mapped textures, select "Force 16 Bit Paste" or "Force 32 Bit Paste." 32-bit textures retain the maximum accuracy of color information from the original PICT you pasted, while 16-bit textures take up half the disk space. The 32-bit option is usually overkill. You may copy any texture to the Clipboard. The Copy command places a copy of the texture in two different formats to the Clipboard; 'ppat' and 'PICT.' (Under System 6, the image is only copied as a 'ppat'.) The PICT format can be read by almost any program, including painting programs. The ppat format can be read by ResEdit™ (although ResEdit does not deal well with patterns larger than 64 by 64 with more than 8 bits of color). Desktop Patterns uses the ppat format when you copy and paste between texture files. No translations are performed on the image, so the operations are very fast. However, if you want to perform any of the operations such as pasting a previously optimized texture in 16 bits instead, you can hold down the Option key while Copying. (This feature functions only under System 7.) This will prevent Desktop Textures from copying the ppat format to the Clipboard. For example, if you have few colors available (such as SE/30 users, who only have Black and White), and an optimized texture does not look good, you can hold down the Option key while selecting Copy, then select the "Force 16 Bit Paste" menu item, and finally select Paste to create a 16-bit version of the texture. This direct-mapped texture will most likely look much better with limited colors. Rename You may Rename any texture except the "Control Panel Compatible" texture. This operation is very straightforward. However, you should avoid duplicate names, since this will interfere with the operation of the Texture menu. It selects textures by name. Also, if you include a left parenthesis in the name, its name will be grayed in the Texture menu. Avoid this as well. Apple Events You may instruct the Desktop Textures Installer to select, preview, and install textures through Apple Events. QuicKeys, as well as the scripting programs Control Tower and UserLand Frontier can send Apple Events in a user-friendly manner since this application contains an 'aete' resource. For those who wish to send Apple Events in other fashions, I describe below the Apple Events that the Installer currently accepts. All the following events are of the class 'misc': Next Texture 'Next' no parameters Selects the next texture in the Texture Picker. Previous Texture 'Prev' no parameters Selects the previous texture in the Texture Picker. Select by Number 'Sel#' short integer Selects the texture by its index (displayed in "Texture Info"). Select by Name 'SelN' text Selects the texture by the name given. Preview Texture 'View' no parameters Previews the current texture on the desktop. Install Texture 'Inst' no parameters Installs the texture shown in the Texture Picker. System Limitations -- A more detailed description System 7 can only display a pixel pattern properly if its expanded pattern data is less than 64 kilobytes. The expanded pattern data consists of the pixels of the pattern mapped to the depth of your screen. For this reason, the size of the expanded pattern data is dependent only on the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the pattern and the Monitors Control Panel setting, and not on the number of colors in the pattern. Warnings will be displayed if you create a pattern that will fail to appear properly for some screen depth. You can also look at the "Texture Info" to find the maximum screen depth for a pasted pattern. This limitation is not only found in System 7. In fact, System 6 has a more restricting limit. The expanded pattern data cannot exceed 32 kilobytes. Also, since System 6 is unable to expand its system heap, previewing on the desktop or installing large textures can cause not the Desktop Textures Installer but the system heap itself to crash at startup (with a system error 25). If this happens, you'll need to find another boot disk to set the screen depth lower again and then reboot. (Since this problem does not occur with System 7, I advocate upgrading to System 7 if you really want access to the full possibilities of desktop textures. : ) A warning dialog will appear if you try to install a texture that System 6 may have problems with. Only chose to "Continue" if you have prepared a boot disk containing the Monitors Control Panel. The texture might cause no problems, of course; System 6 is quite quirky about this. Other Textures Several other people have released desktop pattern resource files for free distribution. The authors include ResEdit installation instructions with their patterns, but it is much easier to use Desktop Textures 2.0 to view and install them. I know of the following desktop textures and highly recommend you check them out: • Green Checker ppat Available for anonymous ftp on sumex-aim.stanford.edu in /info-mac/util The file is called "32x32-background-pattern.hqx." It is a single 32 by 32 pixel pattern; one of the first available. • PatternMania 1 and PatternMania 2 by N. Jonas Englund Available on sumex-aim in /info-mac/art. The files are called "background-pattern-maina.hqx" and "background-pattern-maina-ii.h." A total of 28 very nice patterns, more appropriately called "simulations" by the author. • Desk Pattern by Brian Lowry Available on sumex-aim in /info-mac/cp. The file is called "desk-pattern.hqx." This set contains over 200 patterns (sized 32x32 and 16x16) appropriate for any monitor (even B&W). It also includes an installer Control Panel. Try them and enjoy! Distribution This program is Shareware with a twist -- you are not required to send in any money! We just hope you will anyway. No guilt trips. No annihilating of all your copies within 30 days. If you like our program and our textures and would like to reward us, you may. For this purpose, we have included both of our addresses in the About box. We will share anything you send to one of us (if possible -- it would be difficult to share a postcard, for example, but we accept them happily nonetheless). One last note - we are but poor, humble college students and would love to receive any sort of financial compensation for all our time and effort. : ) You may and we encourage you to distribute this product as long as you do not charge anything beyond the cost of the media. Please include the entire and unmodified distribution set, including the README file and the texture resource files. If you wish to include this product in any software collection (including Shareware or User's Group collections), obtain our permission first. Geoff Adams and Stephen Krauth reserve all legal rights to this software and the included resources and offer no warranty of any kind. Version History • Version 1.0 (March 1992) - First release, posted to netnews only. • Version 1.1 (March 19, 1992) - Fixed a problem in the texture installation routine that could corrupt the System file. • Version 2.0 (August 19, 1992) - Now modeless. - Can now copy and paste PICTs and ppats and install them on the desktop. - Added support for Texture Resource Files. - Can now show information about the size and colors of each texture. - Uses Apple Events if they're available to receive commands from the Finder (or other programs). - Has preferences to remember window placement and other options. - Creates a menu of all textures in the currently open texture resource file. - Allows the renaming of textures. - The texture installation procedure is now much more robust, especially under System 6. - Full-color Texture Picker. - Hundreds of other small changes that accompany the transition to the new interface. Congratulations on Reading This Far! We welcome bug reports as well as suggestions for improvements, additions, or features you might like to see in future versions. Please tell us what you think of the program! Send us a postcard so we know you exist!