Hi Matt_H,
I must agree with some (if not all) of your observations.
* No PNG icon support out of the box
There's really no excuse for this. A PNG icon module exists, why is it not bundled? Better yet, why doesn't icon.library support PNGs directly?
Yep, this should have been included already... fortunately it's just matter if installing alib and the png module fom OS4depot and you're ready to go. No big issue here.
*Another new icon set
These new icons have been appearing in releases of OWB and other programs for months/years already, and now they're system-wide. Personally, I don't care for them. They're absolutely gigantic, too.
Well, I must say that while I really appreciate all the work put on this new icon set, I don't like them and they are very big! I can easily feel my 1920x1200 workbench doesn't have enough space. yes, you can scale them down now but that means I will also have to change the icons for all my previously installed appications in work: otherwise those will look ridiculously small. i wish there was an option to use the old iconset at the install process.
*Inconsistent icon scaling
Fortunately, Workbench prefs now includes an option to set limits on the sizes of icons. It's adjustable to the exact pixel and there are separate scales for the Workbench itself and within drawer windows. Unfortunately, AmiDock is unaffected by the settings. I've had to remove programs from my dock in order to not have it look like a screen real estate monstrosity.
I had to do exactly the same thing here, amidock just takes so much space with these new icons that almost goes from one side to the other of my 1920 pixel wide Wbench... not good! And to make it even better, now it turns out that a bug has been introduced in amidock, there is no way I can make the docky icon from WET Forecaster to show up in amidock if wet is started before amidock... (i.e. both started at boot as configured in the new wbstartup prefs).
*Still no Preview/Test option in GUI prefs
GUI prefs is an absolute mess. There are too many options and it's not clear what they all do. There was a "Preview" button in early releases of 4.0 which said something along the lines of "Not working yet" when pressed. It was cleverly removed in later releases, but the problem of not being able to quickly test what each option does remains.
Well, to be honest there are just too many things you can configure that I usually don't mess with it. It's a problem having to click the "use" button to test a change you will probably won't notice. Only the gadgets option actually has a "test configuration" button.
*No more WBStartup!
This bothers me most of all. While I understand that the intent was to integrate something like WBStartup+, the implementation is, frankly, bad. WBStartup+ works by moving everything in your WBStartup drawer into Enabled and Disabled subdirectories. WBStartup+ then becomes the only program in WBStartup and executes everything in Enabled when run.
This is the one I personally find most annoying. Apparently there is no option to revert to the 'old way'. Besides the fact that it doesn't support the execution of scripts, the startup prefs tool won't allow to set any order or execution priotiry, etc. Fortunately it appears that someone has posted a possible solution to go back to wbstartup directory way of doing it, see
here . I haven't tested the suggestion yet myself , but I will do it asap.
OS4 has removed the WBStartup drawer entirely. Instead, a new Prefs tool controls a list of programs that will be executed (I guess by LoadWB). Now instead of dragging stuff into a drawer, I have to open up a prefs tool and drag stuff in there (or navigate another ASL requester). It's far less parsimonious. I use T.H.E. to enhance keyboard and menu options in Workbench, but it seems this new WBStartup implementation can't execute scripts. It also seems that manually creating a WBStartup directory doesn't do anything. This is the biggest annoyance I've found so far, so my first priority will be to find a workaround.
Yep, I don't like it either. read above for a possible workaround.
Cheers,
Dragster
