File-Type Rules for Enhancing your Desktop
Including a Max patch FTR as an example
Here's a little
goodie , hopefully interesting in itself, but
also designed to pique your interest in enhancing and customizing your
desktop for audio & computer-music applications. This is a very simple
file-type rule (FTR) for
Max
patches. An FTR tells the desktop how to
deal with a given type of file:
-
how to recognize the file (can be by operations on the name,
contents or tag of the file. Tags are unique IDs given to
executables -- see the tag man page).
-
what do draw for the icon: these are specified as geometry so
they can be scaled dynamically as the user wishes. I use the
"iconsmith" program to create icons.
-
what to do when a user does certain things with the icon
(double-clicks, alt-double-clicks,drag-n-drop, etc.)
-
also, an FTR can add items to the right-mouse-button menu
that comes up when you have the icon selected.
There's no "magic" to these FTR's that you can't use yourself as an
end-user or developer. Check out the FTR man page, where we describe
how these work, and, for much more interesting FTR's than the one I
enclose here, check out the FTR's that ship with the system; these are
in /usr/lib/filetype/system. The audio, MIDI, and MOD file rules are in
sgisound.ftr
and
sgimusic.ftr
(these links will only work if you're on an IRIX >= 5.X SGI machine,
sorry).
As people make audio & music applications available, whether
public-domain or commercial, it would be nice to see FTR's for the
applications and their data files, so that when the user installs
the app, it's integrated into his/her desktop.
Anyway, here's how to install and use this extra "goodie." I've set it
up as a tar file, which should de-archive into your
/usr/lib/filetype/install directory (where third-party application
FTR's should go). Most of these operations want you to be root .
-
Extract the tar file. It's compressed.
uncompress max_icon.tar.Z
tar xvlf max_icon.tar
This should extract into /usr/lib/filetype/install.
-
Re-compile the file-type rules.
cd /usr/lib/filetype
make
-
(you don't need to be root to do this) Restart your desktop.
/usr/lib/desktop/telldesktop quit
fm -rlb &
Now your desktop will recognize Max patches, and if you double click on
them, it will bring up Max with that patch (if you have it installed --
talk to Vincent Puig
(vpuig@ircam.fr) for more information on getting
Max for the SGI).
If anyone has any enhancements or interesting file type rules, please
share them with the rest of us!
Doug Scott
dscott@sgi.com