[MacPerl] Droplet feature requests

[herron@cogsci.ucsd.edu (Dan Herron)]

Since Matthias has not, in the last week, released MacPerl 6, harnessed the
power of El Nino to restore stability to out battered stock markets, or parted
any major bodies of water, I'm going to demand that he address the following
earth-shatteringly important issues with droplets, or else I'll have to, uhm,
wait patiently...

1) Could droplets be made to warn the user when too many files are dragged
onto them? At the moment, MacPerl seems to just silently fail when the droplet
doesn't have enough memory to handle all the files (I think). Maybe the memory
partition for droplets could be increased in general (or at perhaps left where
it was when MacPerl rebuilds the droplet), but maybe there's a better
solution.

2) On that point... any way that resources and other things added to droplets
could be _retained_ when MacPerl builds that droplet again? I guess that would
require copying the resources over from the old to the new one if the file
already exists. (At least it doesn't seem to when coming from Alpha.)

3) When you run a Mac app, the first resource file on the chain belongs to the
application itself, making it easy to bring in dialogs, etc. Since droplets
just call MacPerl, the first resource file belongs to MacPerl, _not_ to the
droplet. Any way to fix/fake/improve this? I don't like having to open the
droplet's resource by hand (cause it's ugly when you crash and MacPerl hasn't
closed the resource, etc.) I certainly don't want to load all my resources
into the MacPerl app itself. Not a major problem, but I guess it would be
nice.

Extra-credit) Should files and resources NOT closed by the user be closed when
a script finishes/crashes, or only when MacPerl quits? (On Unix, there is some
very slow but powerful cleanup routine that occurs when a Perl thread
terminates, right? What's the equivalent in MacPerl: script-finish or
MacPerl-quit?)

These have probably been asked (and answered by Matthias) before, but of
course I wouldn't have paid attention, since I thought they didn't concern
me... :)

-dan


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