WINDAS

by Joseph Lynass



At last! The time has come! A Labour government? The Apocalypse? Well

no, not Armageddon, but something equally devastating and uncomfortable

for Macintosh owners (RIP). Yes, the time has come for you humble and

affronted Speccy owners to stand up, widen your eyes, stick out your

tongue, and say: "Scoffetty, scoffetty, scoff, scoff!" or words to that

effect. Why? Because at last you can experience the thrills and - to

risk a cliche - spills of using a pointer/icon/menu environment,

courtesy of sixteen year old Jospeh Lynass from tropical Belfast.



Method

This program is so easy to get up 'n' running. Firstly, type in the 80

(as in 80 - not very many, considering) lines of hex and then save the

subsequent code with SAVE "name" CODE 50000,638. Then (and only then)

may you type in the brilliant demo program just to see how, er,

brilliant this routine really is.



PIMs Anybody?

The PIM system was originally developed on the Apple Macintosh ages

back at the twilight of home computing. And it was such a brilliantly

designed and simple system to use that it was ripped off and strewn

across several million computer formats. The idea is to direct your

pointer (normally an arrow) around the screen, pulling down menus and

selecting files represented by icons (small symbols), the advantage

being that since everything is graphic oriented it can be used by any-

body of any nationality, amateur or professional.



Information

Each window is stored from 50700 onwards in this five byte format:

* 1st byte is the window number (0-254)

* 2nd byte is the top left Y (vertical) co-ord (0-23)

* 3rd byte is the top left X (horizontal) co-ord (0-31)

* 4th byte is the bottom right Y co-ord

* 5th byte is the bottom right X co-ord



The maximum number of windows allowed on-screen at one time is 40, and

always remember to POKE a 255 after the data for the last box. To

display the window use: LET w=USR 50000. This way, when you select a

certain window, the number of that window returns in 'w'. So, if you

select window 11 then w=11. Understand? Good. If w=255 then no window

has been selected.



When the pointer arrow is on the screen use keys Q,A,O,P to move it

around and M to select a window or SPACE to abort. Simple or what?