File-Type Rules for Enhancing your Desktop

Including a Max patch FTR as an example

Here's a little goodie , hopefully interesting in itself, but also designed to pique your interest in enhancing and customizing your desktop for audio & computer-music applications. This is a very simple file-type rule (FTR) for Max patches. An FTR tells the desktop how to deal with a given type of file:

how to recognize the file (can be by operations on the name, contents or tag of the file. Tags are unique IDs given to executables -- see the tag man page).
what do draw for the icon: these are specified as geometry so they can be scaled dynamically as the user wishes. I use the "iconsmith" program to create icons.
what to do when a user does certain things with the icon (double-clicks, alt-double-clicks,drag-n-drop, etc.)
also, an FTR can add items to the right-mouse-button menu that comes up when you have the icon selected.

There's no "magic" to these FTR's that you can't use yourself as an end-user or developer. Check out the FTR man page, where we describe how these work, and, for much more interesting FTR's than the one I enclose here, check out the FTR's that ship with the system; these are in /usr/lib/filetype/system. The audio, MIDI, and MOD file rules are in sgisound.ftr and sgimusic.ftr (these links will only work if you're on an IRIX >= 5.X SGI machine, sorry).

As people make audio & music applications available, whether public-domain or commercial, it would be nice to see FTR's for the applications and their data files, so that when the user installs the app, it's integrated into his/her desktop.

Anyway, here's how to install and use this extra "goodie." I've set it up as a tar file, which should de-archive into your /usr/lib/filetype/install directory (where third-party application FTR's should go). Most of these operations want you to be root .

Extract the tar file. It's compressed.

uncompress max_icon.tar.Z tar xvlf max_icon.tar
This should extract into /usr/lib/filetype/install.
Re-compile the file-type rules.

cd /usr/lib/filetype make
(you don't need to be root to do this) Restart your desktop.

/usr/lib/desktop/telldesktop quit fm -rlb &

Now your desktop will recognize Max patches, and if you double click on them, it will bring up Max with that patch (if you have it installed -- talk to Vincent Puig (vpuig@ircam.fr) for more information on getting Max for the SGI).

If anyone has any enhancements or interesting file type rules, please share them with the rest of us!

Doug Scott
dscott@sgi.com