White Flash

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, Chris Carroll-Davis wrote:

> Does anyone know a cunning way to prevent a window briefly painting
> white when changing the window decorations??

A few things you can try:

1) Set the bottomRight of the window offscreen (like -1000,-1000), do your
changes, and then move the window back to where you want it.  Note that
there is an intermittent bug in window positioning that requires you to
position the window to at least two offscreen locations to make sure the
position "sticks".  I usually do something like this:
 set bottomRight of stack 1 to -1000,-1000
 set bottomRight of stack 1 to -10000,-10000
 set bottomRight of stack 1 to -1000,-1000
Goofy, yes, but it gets around the positioning problem.

2)  If you're using Rev 2.7, try setting the blendLevel of stack itself to
100, do your changes, and then set the blendLevel back to 0.

3) If you're using Rev 2.6 and your stack is Mac-only, you can use Trevor
DeVore's Window external to do a combination of 1 and 2 -- position the
stack offscreen, make changes, set the alpha value of the stack to
transparent, move the stack back, then set the alpha value to opaque.


> I do seem to remember in my SC days (heretic! heretic!) there was
> an xcmd called "no flash" or "don'tPaintWhite" or similar.

I believe this might be the same external that Mark Hanrek wrote while
working with me on RadWindow, the first custom window shape external for SC.
We found the "white flash" annoying and he graciously wrote the WFE (White
Flash Eliminator) external to get around the problem.

Those were fun times.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
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E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com