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Startup/Boot Icons (Extensions and Control Panels)

jmacz

Well-known member
I remember as a kid in the 80s, without a thought about memory and performance, my friends and I would try to get as many startup or boot icons showing on the Welcome to Macintosh screen, almost like a badge of honor on how much software we had found and installed on our Macs. I remember getting into a third row of icons on my Macintosh SE.

What I don’t remember however is having any of these extensions or control panels clearing the screen during boot (the Welcome to Macintosh disappears and the previous icons also all disappear, but the remaining icons show up in the next positions).

I have one extension on my SE doing this right now (Responder) and one control panel on my IIci doing this (E-machines Control Panel). When these extensions or control panels load, the screen clears before the icon shows up and remaining extensions or control panels appear and load to the right.

What causes this screen clear? Is this a bug in those extensions or control panels? Or is there something they do that causes a clear?

My OCD is kicking in :)
 

Byrd

Well-known member
It might be your OS choice - I recall System 7.5 does more "lines", but dog slow on your SE to run before it slows to a crawl filled with extensions!
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
This is from memory, so bear with me and verify before absolutely trusting this information.

First of all, the display of the icon is under the control of the extension or control panel, not under the control of the OS. There's an agreed method for finding out where you should draw your icon, but an ill-behaved extension can cause carnage in your neat rows of icons.

Now, I can't speak for the e-machines control panel, but the other extensions I've seen do it are those that might need to put an alert or dialog box up when loading. The documentation strongly discourages one from doing this, but some extensions (including from Apple!) do it anyway. Responder, for example, will put up a box asking for a computer name if one hasn't already been set.

In order to make sure you can put a dialog box up, you have to first make sure the window manager is actually working. One of the things you have to do to make that happen is to call InitWindows, which if I remember correctly, is the thing that clears the screen, redraws the desktop pattern, and so forth. So those extensions are probably calling InitWindows even if they don't need to put up their alert or dialog box.
 

Crutch

Well-known member
That’s right, it’s covered briefly in Tech Note 247 and there’s even some pretty amusing evangelism about this in there too. All you can really do is reorder your INITs (by changing their first letter to re-alphabetize them, probably) such that these offenders load either first or last, assuming that doesn’t break them.

I have a similar pet peeve with some of the older INITs that don’t let their ShowINIT icons be drawn above the bottom row (I also run a lot of INITs…). The solution there is also just to load them early enough in the boot sequence such that the bottom row is appropriate.

1685360849296.png
 

joevt

Well-known member
I forget, but didn't Conflict Catcher affect icon drawing at startup, or did it only affect boot order?

I suppose one could make an init that traps InitWindows to capture the ShowINIT icon area and redraw it after InitWindows returns.
 
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