Re: Zippier outliner development environment?

[tjw@omnigroup.com]

  Err -- not knowing much about how the outliner is implemented, this  
doesn't seem like a hard problem.  When you start a drag, you cache the  
'image' that is being drawn.  Assuming that you have backing-store for the  
window you are dragging over, this is a very efficient operation.

  Maybe this won't work for outliners, but it should unless they draw  
differently based on their position.

-tim


Begin forwarded message:

Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 23:59:08 -0800
From: randall.smith@Eng.Sun.COM (Randy Smith)
To: self-interest@self.smli.com, cam@elliott.net
Subject: Re: Zippier outliner development environment?

> If I drag a closed outliner around over an empty portion of
> the world, I am quite pleased with the redraw speed.
> But when I start dragging open outliners around over other
> open outliners, things really slow down.
>


An open outliner has 15 ba-zillion morphs in it. When you carry one open
outliner over another that's 30 ba-zillion redraws coming down the
wire.

It's not really bad locally, as other Ultra users have testified.  I would
take a wild stab and guess that your bottleneck is the speed of your
X-server.

If we ever do another release, you would find an optional "simple
outliners" mode.  This is good for introductory programming -- regular
outliners have become awfully decorated.  (A "simple outliner" has
somewhat fewer morphs.)

Sorry can't help much!  Best of luck,

	--Randy