stick
is a small BASIC program that I wrote years ago, originally in assembler,
which has saved me a lot of work. It is useful for those wimp programs
which do not open windows but put an icon on the iconbar, and for which
all user input is either by clicking on the iconbar icon or by dragging
something to it. The use of stick allows you to define your application
by means of Obey files called !Select, !Adjust and !Drag, which are triggered
when these actions take place. These Obey files (or TaskObey files in
appropriate circumstances) may typically execute non-wimp programs in
other languages. In other words, stick creates a wimp-task that handles
only clicks on the iconbar (including Menu) or drags to the iconbar, and
nothing else, pushing out to !Select, !Adjust and !Drag, as far as they
exist, the responsibility for how the computer should react.
You can download as an example
the application taskW which runs in a taskwindow an executable that is dragged to it.
Its !Drag file is a TaskObey file (filetype &FD7) which runs its first commandline
argument (%0) which is always the pathname of the object dragged onto the iconbar icon.
Its !Run file's essential command is
stick <Obey$dir>
which creates the application and puts its icon on the iconbar.
Every
sticky
application of this kind must have a template file called Templates, with
a window-template called
info
in it. This is to give the application an iconbar menu that behaves properly.
The simplest way of creating the template file is to copy the one in !taskW
and edit it in a template-editor. I realize that it would have been easier for you
had I brought out a version of stick that used MessageTrans to provide the
menu items from a text file, but it would have meant more code in stick to create
the menu, and I am lazy.
