A seeming screw-up... but no... not so...

[John Esak]

I want to make a comment about a comment made on the movie I put up for the
filePro-based index of the Survivor Series Tutorials.

Someone said (he can remain nameless in case he doesn't want to be known)
that when I was describing how great filePro was in its flexibility, enough
so that I could build a really nice "install" program with it... and "even
turn the cursor off when it's not needed...."  Just as I was saying that and
pointing to the screen where the cursor was turned off... he said it was
pretty funny because right there on the screen was a great big honking
purple cursor!  :-)  :-(

Okay, well, I immediately chalked this up to my not being able to actually
"see" the screen as I talk... and thought it was just one of those
unfortunate things... BUT, not so.  It may not be apparent, but it is rather
difficult, no, exceedingly difficult to make such a detailed (and long)
movie without making mistakes serious enough to have to stop and sew things
together. So, while it may also not be apparent, I rehearsed that little
movie about 6 times before I did the take and therefore, I *knew* exactly
what I wanted to say and when to say it... so, it bugged me no end that he
said the cursor was *there* even though I was saying "See, you can even turn
the cursor off when you need to so that the install looks very
professional."  It irked me so much that I went back and scrutinized the
movie (and my code)... and it is all absolutely correct... the cursor does
get turned off for the time that a message is up saying "Please wait..." and
*then* it gets turned back on again for the very next prompt which says
"Continue?"  where it is waiting for user input... needs a cursor there.  As
it turns out, all went as planned except that I had just tried the install
off-camera... and it was likely in the cache. In any case, for whatever
reason, the little prompt with no cursor "Please wait..." blinked on and off
the screen so fast that you never actually see a time when the cursor is
truly off.  I will tell you that on my test machine which is a very slow old
beast, the "Please wait..." with no cursor is there on the screen for at
least 10 seconds... then the cursor comes back for the MESGBOX prompt.

So, while I'm sure it looked very stupid me saying "look, no cursor..." and
there being a big purple cursor right there all the time... well, such are
the bets laid plans of mice and filePro programmers.  I knew  I did it
right.... and I would not have been able to sleep tonight if it had been SO
wrong.  I guess I should be happy that I have such a blazingly fast
machine... it is a core duo 2.6 and it really does fly except for loading
CD's... filePro is instantaneous... except for one thing. and I'll put that
in the next note as a question. This explanation is over... :-)

John

The movie is still at http://www.valar.com/forum1.wmv  should you like to go
and see what I was talking about here.