This is a public beta version of Virtual. It is copyrighted by Pierre-Luc Paour. It expires on 05/18/95. After that day, it will be available from online services, either as FreeWare, or ShareWare. You may distribute it freely, as long as you do not charge for it beyond the cost of the distribution medium, and as long as you distribute this documentation with it.
What is Virtual?
If you're familiar with X-Windows workstations, you have probably used one virtual window manager or other. Virtual is one of those, for the Mac. It presents you with multiple 'virtual screens' where you can place your windows, so you don't have a clutter of them on your real screen. You can switch virtual screens with a key combination, or by choosing that screen in the Virtual window. You can drag windows around to move them to other screens, and so on.
Obviously, if you don't have enough memory to open more than one application at a time, you don't need Virtual (in that case, don't use Office 4.2 either :-)
Virtual is provided as-is. I am not liable for any damage it causes to your system. I will, however, offer limited assistance. I also welcome bug reports and wish-lists.
Requirements
Color QuickDraw, System 7.1 or later (the Layer Manager was documented for that system), 150kb of memory.
How do I use Virtual?
It's just an application, no extension, no trap patching, no messing up with your system. You just need to open Virtual. You'll see a floating window divided in several parts (the virtual screens) that shows smaller versions of all your windows. One of the screens is in a darker shade of gray and has a small menu bar at the top; it's the active screen. One or several windows can be highlighted; they're the frontmost application's windows.
You can:
• click and drag the small windows to other virtual screens.
• click on another virtual screen to make it the active screen.
• double-click on a small window to switch to the screen it's in and make the window active.
• use the F5-F12 function keys on your extended keyboard to go to the corresponding screen (F5 = screen 1, …, F12 = screen 6).
If you don't like the default colors, or you think the Virtual window is too small or too big, don't worry, just change the preferences. The geometry parameter describes the number of virtual screens you want to have (horizontally x vertically). The scale parameter describes how much smaller the virtual screens are drawn in the Virtual window than they are in reality (big scale means small Virtual window).
Sticky Windows
Some windows should always be on the active screen. The Virtual window and the Finder's Desktop window (where all the icons that are on the desktop reside, like hard drives, the trash, etc.) are obvious examples. But you might also want some windows to always be on your real screen. Use the Exclude… button in the Preferences Dialog to set which windows should stick.
Plea -- Developpers Read This
Once you've played with Virtual for some time, you will begin to feel that it would be much better to use if it was a window floating above all others. This is what I originally wanted and still want to do. And there's a very easy way to do it: I just need to use Matt Slot's <fperfect@umich.edu> 'appe Windows' code. Unfortunately, the only version that I have is written in Think C, and I'm using Code Warrior. The problem is that these two environments handle assembler differently and some parts of appe Windows are written in assembler. Since I'm not at all familiar with assembler, I haven't been able to succesfully port the code to CW.
So, if you know how to do this, or know someone who already did it, please get in touch with me.
To Do
• Floating window.
• Keyboard shortcuts to swich between applications and windows and zoom directly to the proper virtual screen.
• Have a way to force applications to open their windows in a predefined virtual screen.
• Add support for multiple monitors (Virtual is currently incompatible with multiple monitors).
Thanks to
Michael Hecht, for the interface to the Layer Manager used by Virtual.
Troy Gaul, for permission to use Infinity Windowid.
Dair Grant, for the ColourBlock CDEF.
Arnaud "nono" Mouronval and Gauthier Houël, for their beta-testing efforts and ideas.
Matt Slot, because I hope I'll be able to use his code some day…
