| At the simplest level there really isn't anything more to converting from DOpus 4 to
DOpus 5 than just load your settings file from 4 into 5 using the "Load
Environment..." item from the Settings menu, but that's just the start.
 |
Converting your existing
Opus 4 setup over to
Opus 5 couldn't be easier! |
There's a lot you can get rid of, thanks to the way DOpus 5 works. You'll probably have
copy, move and delete buttons in your Opus 4 button bank that you can get rid of, thanks
to the buttons that do exactly the same in the DOpus lister toolbar. You may even have
buttons to open a drive's contents in one of your two Opus listers in 4, but since DOpus 5
has as many listers as you need, you may as well not bother with those unless you really
want to. Eventually, you'll find that your DOpus 4 button bank which all seemed so
necessary will just wither away into seven or eight buttons that you can't or just don't
want to get rid of.
As you get more and more acclimatised to the new version, you'll find that your old
ways of doing stuff kind of fade away and get replaced by new methods. For instance, it
was very popular to have buttons in DOpus 4 to open specific drawers and drives in a
lister. Why bother now when a double LMB click on the backdrop opens a fresh lister that
you can choose your location in easily enough? Likewise, having a button each for LHA list
and LHA extract is pointless since in DOpus 5 you can treat archives much like any other
type of directory. If you want to extract directly you can still do it, but double
clicking on an LHA or LZX archive will now give you the contents of that archive in a new
lister which isn't special in any way - you can treat it as a normal lister with normal
files and do normal things to them, like adding files, deleting files and so on.
There are more advantages to the DOpus 5 style of doing things that won't immediately
come up. You'll be doing something one way, because that's the way you always did it in 4
and all of a sudden you'll realise that there's a much simpler way in 5. Also, because of
the fact that Opus is now Workbench, you're so much freer to have your programs integrate
seamlessly - to look as though they are part of Workbench - than ever before.
As an example for graphics card owners, running your DOpus screen in 16-bit means that you
can use CyberWindow as your image viewer. This will give you images in their own
Intuition-style windows directly on your Workbench. No more click as your monitor re-syncs
to a different screenmode in order to show something, it's there on the screen - the same
screen with no fuss and no bother.
Get Cyberwindow off this CD and put it somewhere in your path. Then open up the
Filetypes window (shortcut:  5) and
either double click on the IFF picture setting that should already be there, or make your
*own*.
This will bring up a new window which will give you further options - configure the
filetype for double click actions, User1 actions and the like. You can also have pop-up
menu entries for that filetype and give it a default icon to use if it doesn't have one
and you want to see it in icon mode, much like the DefIcons package which is now entirely
superseded by Opus. So, double click on the Double-click entry...
Make a new Workbench command by clicking on the "Add" button and changing the
cycle gadget to "Workbench", then click on the little folder icon to the right
of that to bring up a file requester to find CyberWindow. Once you've found it and hit OK,
it will put the path in the string gadget to the right of the file button and you can add
whatever options you think you might need. Personally I just use the "resize"
option for Cyberwindow (which Opus takes from Cyberwindow's tooltypes) , followed by the
DOpus marker {F}. This should all be pretty familiar to you from DOpus 4, but in case you
don't remember the options there's a button with curly brackets on it to the right of the
string gadget. Lastly, you might need to set some flags. I just have "Run
asynchronously" set for myself which means that you can show one picture from the
directory and then immediately double click on another without having to close the first
one first.
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If in doubt, trying dragging and dropping can result in success. |
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Pick a chapter:
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