SHAREWARE NEWS

August 1997

by Louis Bookbinder

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SHAREWARE SAMPLE

This month's Free Sample Shareware is no longer available.

SMUG August '97 Disk of the Month

Assembled by Henry Polard

Birthdays and Such
Birthdays and Such is an application meant to be launched on daily startup, to remind you of the important birthdays and anniversaries in your life. It works for the author, which has made him the envy of all his friends and relatives. By setting reminders 10 or so days ahead, he found he's as on the ball as the best of the rest of his friends and relatives in remembering to buy cards and presents (and to actually send them)&emdash;and way ahead of the date-impaired. $What-it's-worth (ask the author)

FontBook
FontBook is a small utility that is especially interesting for layouters and desktop publishers. Suppose you need a certain special character of a font, like Zapf Dingbats, but you don't know the key code. Some utilities like KeyCaps or PopChar will solve this, but FontBook works a bit differently: You can print a reference card of the font, nice and big, to find the right characters. $10

Karma Manager
Karma Manager is a program which takes a word or phrase and rearranges the letters into other words or phrases. For example, if you take the phrase "Anagram Maker" you can rearrange the letters to get "Karma Manager." $7

Netscape History
'Netscape History' is a utility for users of the Macintosh version of Netscape (and Microsoft Internet Explorer) that lets them browse off-line (not connected to the Internet) the last Web pages visited with their browser. Images will be correctly shown, if they were loaded when the page was read from the net. $8

OT/PPP Strip
The OT/PPP control strip module is a plug-in for Apple's Control Strip that displays information about your "state of affairs" with regards to Apple's native Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) implementation for Open Transport. It visually informs you whether or not you are presently connected using PPP, and can optionally display the amount of time you've been connected, the baud rate you're connected at, and indicate PPP activity (data being sent and received.) Free

Super Countdown
Super Countdown is an application that acts as a timer, for both counting up and down. Free

URL Database
This hypercard stack is a simple database for storing URLs. 1) There's an Index card that displays a list of the URLs in the stack. The list can be sorted by name or date. 2) The user can create categories to organize the URLs into manageable groups. The stack makes it easy to copy a URL to the Clipboard to paste into a browser; this is done by simply clicking on a name in the list. Adding a new URL to the stack is easy: copy a URL, from anywhere, and click on the New button. The URL will be automatically pasted into the URL field. Free

WebFire!
Defend the web! An unseen hacker is sending wave after wave of bugs, viruses and worse in this shoot'em up. If you can handle them all you can scoop up the packet that reveals his identity and shut him down! Free

Window Monkey
This fun and useful program monkeys with your windows - in a good way, of course. With Window monkey you'll be able to:

Add different background patterns, pictures or textures to any window in the Finder.
Use the handy Window Monkey menu to guickly go to any window in any application, even if it's buried beneath many other windows.
Open recently used folders at any time with a click of the mouse.
Instantly jump to any open or recent folder from an Open or Save dialog box.

Simply put, Window Monkey lets you work more easily with better-looking windows. $20

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PS: Today, the day after the General meeting, I find two of the July DOM selections have upgrades! This happens, sometimes. If you want either Excalabur 2.5 or Program Switcher 4.3.2, just write us and we will have replacements available for you at the next meeting.

SECURITY ALERT!

Be sure to get the new version of Disinfectant 3.7.1

Netscape Communicator 4.0 bogging down? Clean up your Bookmarks file: many users noted remarkable speed improvements after most of the bookmarks were gone.

Some apps which choke on Mac OS 8: AfterDark, Speed Doubler, Now Utilities - MacWatch. Berkeley Systems has a fix, version 4.0.3, for AfterDark. - MacCentral

Tip O' the Month

From Your Shareware Team

Keys to the Kingdom:

Eudora has a LOT of shortcut keys - intentionally, so you can just type, and not have to stop to mouse around. Here are some I picked up from a review in My Mac Magazine (http://www.mymac.com):

To reply to a letter, just hit command-R - you get all the text of the letter quoted, within a new reply letter, for you to edit as you will. If you only want to quote PART of the letter, highlight that part before you start the reply, hit command-SHIFT-R instead, and the reply letter will quote only that part.

To switch Eudora windows, use command-\ (backslash).

And finally, a strange trick inherited from UNIX, of all things (one would think you could not inherit ANYTHING from Unix - bad pun): In the middle of your letter, don't hunt for the page down key, just hit the space bar! BONUS TIPS: Space bar also works with Navigator and Newswatcher! And it also lets you navigate through the news postings! Of course, only works in read-only mode. When writing a new letter, the space bar just inserts a space!

Want to get your name in the newsletter? Send us YOUR tip - and if I like the tip, (and I remember your name,) I will tell who sent it to me! Maybe a free mug, too!

Need Technical Information? visit Apple's Tech Info Library at http://til1.info.apple.com/ (that's TIL1)

SIMPLY MAC

Mac basics we sometimes forget

Some more startup trickery: Hold command key down to start without virtual memory. Hold shift-option to start with ONLY Ram Doubler (if you have it). Hold tilde [~] to start normally WITHOUT Ram Doubler if you have it.

Free SMUG MUG to anyone who comes up with a powerkey we haven't heard of!

You all know that "Rebuilding the Desktop" is just a way of recompiling the information about your folders and icons that is kept in the two invisible desktop files, right? It makes sense that every disk volume has desktop files to save this information. Sometimes you can avoid lots of disk problems by doing this not only on your hard disk, but on your other disks, as well, including floppies and ZIP disks!

Two ways to do it: just after you insert a disk, hold down command-option before the icon appears. Or, use a shareware item we sold you a few months back, Disk Sweeper. With Disk Sweeper, you need only drop the disk icon on the Disk Sweeper icon to have it rebuild the disk's desktop file. Either way, this could save you some headaches. And as a bonus, rebuilding the desktop on a disk could recover some space lost to the directory! -Thomas Carlson

From Chuck Shotton via Dave Winer: The more files you have in your System Folder, the longer it takes to boot. Netscape and Inetexploser both store web caches in Preferences in the System Folder. When the cache gets full, boot slows WAY down. Best bet: create a ram disk and designate it for storing your cache. This also speeds up revisiting pages (the purpose of the cache) enormously.

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