Written by Mark Johns and Justin Lee at MacHack 2000
Many thankx to George Warner and Paul Baxter for their
help in writing this horribly frightening extension...
About Doggie-Style Windows 1.0
During the keynote of this year's MacHack, our speaker, Eric S. Raymond, spent quite a bit of time detailing the territorial aspect of open source project coordination. He paralleled the practice of certain persons controlling a project's main code distribution and maintenance to the simplistic insticts of dogs. "Have you ever noticed that your dog knows where your property line is?", said Raymond, pointing out how dogs automatically know when to bark when strangers cross your property line; That is how it is with open-source projects, he elaborated. There are unwritten laws in the open-source community which give those who do extensive work on a project the right to be in charge of assembling all the source patches and releasing final distributions.
We considered and then accepted this idea and obliviously continued to listen, in rapt and undying attention, to the rest of his keynote address. Then, slowly, a feeling of horrendous un-right cast its shadow over our sleep-deprived minds. If an animal as simple as a dog has this intuitive knowledge of their owner's property lines, how come our Macintosh's windows don't?
We pondered this quandary long and hard and finally came up with the obvious solution: patch the Macintosh System with our own skanky code to add this important feature to the toolbox.
What it does and how to install it
Doggie-Style Windows is a system extension which patches several Window Manager calls to produce our desired dog-like behavior. When Doggie-Style is installed, all windows on the screen will "run away" from the currently selected window so that they do not overlap its screen space. Holding down on the shift key while resizing, moving, and switching between windows will cause the windows to act in their normal, un-dog-like manner. To install, drag the Doggie-Style Windows extension into your System Folder.
Doggie-Style Windows was written entirely at the MacHack conference and the source code is distributed freely alongside it for any interested hackers (btw, DSW patches SelectWindow(), MoveWindow(), and SizeWindow) . We only ask that if you use any of the code in a future project, please give us some mention in your Readme.
The original patch code was generated by Paul Baxter's PatchMaker (which is actually a hack from last year), and then the rest of DSW was written in a beta version Metrowerks CodeWarrior 6.
System Requirements
Doggie-Style Windows requires any Power Macintosh machine and Sound Manager 3. We wrote and tested it in 0S 9 but we believe that it will run just fine under System 7 and 8.
The Requisite Disclaimer
We are not responsible for any adverse effects that this extension may cause-- Its a hack: deal with it. Feel free to use and distribute Doggie-Style Windows anywhere you want as long as you send an e-mail to Mark or Justin if you distribute it on a cd. We'd love to hear who's using our little annoying hack.
Contact Information
The Authors may be reached at the following addresses:
Mark Johns: sloppy@sloppydisk.com, cybrsong@ix.netcom.com
Justin Lee: jlee@uni.uiuc.edu
George Warner: geowar@apple.com
Paul Baxter: paul@paulbaxter.com
SloppyDisk Software: http://www.sloppydisk.com
Patchmaker: http://www.patchmaker.com
And finally, Eric S. Raymond may be reached at the following:
