Assume you have an application consisting of a large number of screens, and you want to enhance the look and feel of as many of the screens as you can in the fastest possible way. You also want the screens to have a consistent and similar look and feel, and it should be possible to make a change in one single place that will affect all screens using the same attribute tag (3DBox tag). You don't want to change the host side since that is a lot of work, and you still want some of the clients to be able to use other terminal emulators in parallel to AniTa.
This is a very common situation, and a perfect scenario for the use of AniTa Hotscreens.
Hotscreens is a framework for screen enhancement. When a Hotscreen becomes active, it can implement many of the fundamental mechanisms like Hotspots and 3D-Box tagging. It can also run Actions when a screen becomes active an "unactions" when it goes out of scope. A Hotscreen can become active depending on screen content, or by command from the application.
When looking at a typical application screen, we often see a coloring scheme that clutters the screen with colors in a way that perhaps made sense at some time, but is now just looking "old-style" and messy. Since most of the 3D-Box screen enhancements in AniTa is based on mapping colors to attributes, it is important that the screen colors and layout is useful. One way to make them useful is to make sure the host application displays colors in the right place so AniTa can map these colors to paint nice looking 3DBox attributes. Another way is to let AniTa do the coloring completely. A third way is to combine the coloring of the host application with the AniTa coloring.
The default AniTa setting is to override the host coloring with AniTa coloring. This typically makes the screen look kind of sophisticated gray background with a few colors based on mapping monochrome attributes like "Reversed" to some color and then mapping that color to some 3D-Box definition like "OutBox".
This section will step-by-step show how to create enhance a screen using the Hotscreen technique. We will put 3D-Box attributes on lead text and input fields. We will first create a few 3DBox styles and then use these 3DBox styles when enhancing the screen. In this example, we will use a coloring attribute called "persistent colors". AniTa will paint the screen with colors that is not affected by the host system, I.E. the colors painted by the Hotscreen function will remain the same even if the host is putting other colors on the screen while the hotscreen is active. This is good since the host cannot destroy what Hotscreen does to the screen.