Feature request: open stack visuals

[Karl Becker]

>On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 Shari <gogypsy at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>>  Going crazy!  Wish to implement a visual effect on opening a stack
>>  with the GO command either via:
>
>Sorry, there's no way to do that.  I can't even think of any way this
>could even theoretically work because MetaCard doesn't draw the window
>title bar or borders, so the *OS* would have to do the visual effect,
>and no OS I know of supports anything like this.  You might ask the OS
>X developers for this, though.  They're *very* fond of doing
>unconventional stuff like that ;-)

To play devil's advocate, here's the link to let Apple know you'd 
like this  8-)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
(I can imagine Jobs getting wind of this, having some teary-eyed 
flashback of HyperCard, and then deciding on a whim to change the 
whole desktop metaphor from "Aqua" to "Rolodex cards," with all 
window updates done thru visual effects... I digress tho  ;-)  )

Like Scott said, though, that would be most impossible.  However, one 
thing I noticed my programming cousin did in VisualBasic for Windows 
was:
1) he gets the contents of the entire screen
2) makes a new window that contains an image of the entire screen 
(usually the windows desktop)
3) with VisualBasic he can draw images right into an off-screen 
GWorld, so he was able to create the illusion of a weird, very 
irregular window on the desktop by simply drawing an alpha-masked 
image on top of this fake desktop image

You probably could fake it somehow with MetaCard, tho... Try taking 
an image of the first card of the going-to stack, do a visual effect 
to show that image in your current stack, then just open the going-to 
stack at the exact same location as the current stack.

Faking stuff sucks, but when it makes the impossible possible...   ;-)

-- 
Karl Becker, KB Productions - http://www.karlbecker.com
Featuring:New Tricks, Tiger's Eye Pub, and The Fishin' Hole