can workbench remember the position of appicons?

folks,

here's a bit of a newbie question, but it drives me bonkers: if i iconify an application, say playcdda or tunenet, i might move its icon somewhere on the workbench that seems more appealing to me.

but then if i double-click on the application and later re-iconfiy, the icon is back where it was. so whatever position the programmer seems to think best is always the location of the iconified app -- i have to move it every time i iconify.

isn't there some method to get workbench to 'remember' the position of the icon so that if i move it, re-open the application, and re-iconify, the icon returns to where i had placed it earlier? is there a commodity that can do this for me?

-- eliyahu

Workbench can't, but the application can and is responsible for snapshotting AppIcons. Sometimes there is a position option located in the prefs. If it is something I've written, you will normally find Workbench's Icon=>Snapshot option will do the trick.

In the case of TuneNet, I think it just grabs the application icon, so snapshotting that in the right place might cause it to be remembered.

It's likely to be possible to write a commodity, I think WB's ARexx port can list everything on the root window including AppIcons, so it might even be possible with ARexx. However I've lost my WB ARexx port documentation so can't check right now.

Ah, found it. The following command will move TuneNet's AppIcon to position 200,200:

rx "ADDRESS workbench 'ICON root NAMES ""TuneNet: File Drop"" X 200 Y 200'"

I will leave writing a small commodity which monitors Workbench's root window for AppIcons and moves them on creation, as an exercise for the reader

(HINT: Query "GETATTR window.icons.all NAME root STEM root" and compare properties name, top, left and type (= APPICON))

I don't think there is any C interface for this stuff, but writing a program in C which fires off the appropriate ARexx commands isn't too difficult. It just needs a nice GUI which can list and snapshot icons.