Will Dyson on Fri, 27 Sep 2002 02:27:27 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] .directory files


Ian Reinhart Geiser wrote:

On Thursday 26 September 2002 07:34 pm, Will Dyson wrote:
BeOS certainly did. It's gui used arbitrary user-settable attributes on
files and directories to full effect.

But did BeOS store stuff like icon position and state in the metadata too?
I did not think they did, but for the life of me i never remember seeing hidden files either.... or did tracker keep tabs on icons locations for the user?

Yeah, the tracker did that. However, a look at the list of attributes for a file wouldn't make this terribly obvious, since the tracker encoded the position in a string attribute named 'tracker_<foo>' (where foo is something I can't remember). If I'd designed it, I'd have made it use integer attrs 'icon_x' and 'icon_y'...


Although a file's icon was normally determined by it's mimetype attribute (there was a system database mapping mimetypes to default icons and other default info), you could also set a file's icon individually and that icon would be stored as an attribute as well.

--
Will Dyson
"Back off man, I'm a scientist!" -Dr. Peter Venkman

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