SHAREWARE NEWS

DEC 95 DISK OF THE MONTH (DOM)

by Louis Bookbinder

The shareware team is delighted to have the club's new PowerMac to work with. This should allow us to show the shareware better, faster, and include PPC-only items. Thanx to the club officers, and to the paying membership.

This month includes:

Accomplice v1.2b3:
a Control Panel that allows you to perform several functions quickly and easily no matter what application you are in (even in a modal dialog). By holding down certain modifier keys and clicking anywhere, you access a pop-up menu that allows you to: 1) change the current process, 2) change the screen depth (the number of colors shown on-screen), 3) change the speaker volume, or 4) insert an unusual character into whatever document you're working in at the current insertion point.
Shareware fee $10.00

Announce 1.2.6:
A simple and polished network utility for sending instant text and audio messages to other users. Send the same message to many users. Save groups of users. Send multiple messages at the same time. Lets sender know when receiver reads message. Will log received messages to text file. Fully-functional Shareware. Unlimited user license is $39.00.

Clouds AD 2.0.1 Module (fat):
- This Macintosh After Dark module draws animated, fractal clouds. Like the real thing, they come in an almost infinite variety of shapes. Just wait and see.... Clouds 2.0 is shareware.
Shareware fee $5.00

EPStoPICT 1.0:
An application that can read any portable EPS file and convert it into a Macintosh PICT file, suitable for editing with a Macintosh drawing application, or for viewing with any application that supports standard PICT files.
Shareware fee $24.95

LetterHeader 1.5.4:
A control panel device that lets you 'design' one or more letterheads by importing PICTs and placing them (and/or reducing them) on a mockup page. Then when you print a document, you get extra controls that let you automatically print your letterhead, in addition to whatever the program normally prints. A great utility if you fax a lot of stuff and don't want to waste your 2-4 color letterhead, or if you're tired of doing the Scrapbook shuffle to paste your letterhead into your word processor. It's also great for putting an automatic 'fax postit note' on the page or putting the word DRAFT under the text of your word processor.
Shareware fee $20.00

Malph 2.5:
A Drag Manager-aware switching/launching utility. Use Malph to switch between applications under System 7 instead of pulling down the application menu. To switch to another app, simply click on the application icon. Malph also has a small indicator showing what process is currently front-most, which updates if you click in application windows to switch between processes.
Postcardware

MenuTrix 1.1:
A neat little utility program that puts two small "thermometers" in the menu bar that show at a glance how much memory is being used and how much memory is available. MenuTrix also animates the menu bar when an application is "switched" to the front. Two very useful additions to the Mac interface!
Shareware fee $5.00

Snd Organizer 1.0:
This Program list all sounds that your system can "see". You can change the name of the sounds, play the sounds asynchronously or randomly play sounds.
Shareware fee $7.0

Snow:
Instead of a screensaver, why not try a little Mac Seasonal Magic? Leave your mac a few minutes, and snowflakes begin gently to fall down your screen.

TextBrowser 1.1b1 (fat):
Free, Starts up quickly, Doesn't need much memory, Correctly reads Macintosh, MS-DOS, and Unix text files, Apple Event aware, Can display a file in Hexadecimal if necessary, Can open the file with another application, eg ResEdit if requested, Fat Binary, Displays in any font as long as it is Monaco 9.

Wait! 1.0:
provides you with a means of changing the Finder¹s rename delay through a Control Panel, and without having to restart your machine.
Shareware fee $5.00

Xmas lights.:
Decorate your screen with these flashing lights.

IN ADDITION:
Check out THE BEST OF 94 disks - a set of two -2.8 Meg of the best shareware among all the Disks of the Month offerred in 1994. Flash-It, Shutdown FX, Shrinkwrap, TechTools, many others. Buy it as a stocking stuffer - a small gift guarranteed to delight any Mac user.

Also, we put out new Internet disks from time to time. This month we have new versions of Newswatcher, John Norstad's superior freeware Usenet newsgroup reader, and MacWeb, the lightest full-featured Web browser around. Note that we try to keep the latest version of all Internet software. See the catalog at the shareware desk for all the best internet software available. Nothing you can buy will give you more value.

Tip O' the Month

From Your Shareware Team

If you zap your PRAM (Option-Command-P-R on startup) you will lose some custom settings. Check these out whenever you do this:

AppleTalk settings (in Chooser)
Cursor and menu blink settings (General Control cp)
Key repeat and delay (Keyboard cp)
32-bit addressing (VERY IMPORTANT! - Memory cp)
mouse settings (Mouse cp)
alert sounds (Sound cp)

OOPS! Sometimes I make mistakes: In April I suggested that if you use TechTool to zap the PRAM, you save first, zap, then restore. Don't restore. This just puts the faulty data back in the PRAM. When you zap the PRAM, the PRAM gets its info from some mysterious chips on the motherboard. Only restore if the settings above refuse to work. You might save those PRAM settings now, while you are sure they are OK. Then you can restore later if you do not want the bother of resetting everything above.

BTW: get the new version (1.0.8) of TechTool - it is much better than earlier ones.

€If you have a disk in the Mac and you want to eject it before you start your Mac, hold down the mouse button as you turn your Mac on. This should eject your floppy.

The best way to eject a floppy disk is to drag its icon to the trash can. This will not delete any files on the disk. If you use the Special menu eject command, it will leave a grayed out icon on your desktop.

€If you add and remove files from a floppy several times, the directory will get filled with junk and take up considerable room. For instance, take a high-density floppy and fill it with 3 files, then remove them. A newly formatted floppy uses 1K for the empty directory, and has 1.3M (really about 1430K) for new stuff. After use, it may have 20K in the empty directory. To recover, rebuild the floppy's desktop. Yes, floppies have desktops, too. Hold down Command-Option while inserting the disk. This will recover considerable space. If you have files on the floppy, this will not remove them. It does NOT reformat your disk. It just rebuilds its desktop. You can also use one of our shareware items - Disk Sweeper - which does the same thing, easier. Sometimes I find a floppy will not take a new item, so I drop its image on Disk Sweeper, and ZAP! the floppy now has enough room.

Without something like Disk Sweeper, Command-Opt at bootup rebuilds the desktops for all volumes currently mounted. To rebuild the desktop for a single volume, here is a trick: create a tiny, non-empty file in Simpletext and save it as Desktop to the volume (at root level) desired. The finder will ask if you wish to replace the current (invisible) Desktop file. Do it. Since this is not a valid Desktop file, the next time you reboot that desktop file will be rebuilt.

€The size of a file depends partly on the size of your disk. A double density floppy will allocate multiples of 1K for each file. So, if your file has 1,234 bytes, it will take up 2K on the disk. A High Density disk takes 2K multiples. That same file still takes 2K, but a 2,345 byte file now takes 4K instead of 3K. It is much worse for your hard disk. Up to 120Mb, disks allocate multiples of 4K. But after that it may be 8K or even 16K. This may not seem like much on a 600Mb hard disk, but it can cause problems when space gets tight. It also means that on AVERAGE, each file wastes 1/2 its allocation size - 20 files on a High Density floppy will waste 10K of disk space. There is nothing you can do about this, except on hard disks, where you can partition the drive into smaller pieces which will have smaller allocation multiples.

New Apple Software Updates Posted Online

The following Apple software updates have recently been released and posted on America Online, AppleLink, Compuserve, eWorld and Apple's Internet sites:

* Open Transport 1.0.8 - A maintenance release of Open Transport networking software. It is designed for installation on Power Macintosh 7200, 7500, 8500, and 9500 computers.

* MIDI Management Tools 2.0.2 - This is a temporary posting of the last release of the MIDI Manager.

* Apple LAN Utility 1.0b4 - The Apple LAN Utility is provided to perform the following tasks for Apple LAN interfaces: 1) Obtain the burned-in address without connecting to a network. 2)Override the burned-in address with a locally-administered address. 3) Set the speed for token ring interfaces that are software selectable.

* Document Converter 1.0.4 - Part of MacLink Plus translation capabilities, this software will translate a file without opening it according to user set preferences

* Quickdraw GX (QDGX) Print Spooler Patch - Patch to fix a problem when printing in AppleShare and Novell Netware print spoolers using QuickDraw GX. For QuickDraw GX 1.1.1, 1.1.2, and 1.1.3.

* PANTONE for AppleVision - The PANTONE Color Picker consists of a self contained Macintosh system extension. This extension is an extensible color picker module which displays calibrated PANTONE Colors from the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. It will display the PANTONE Colors in three modes.

* Mail*Link for PowerTalk QM 1.6 - This is a personal gateway for PowerTalk users. This gateway will allow PowerTalk users to send and receive mail from their QuickMail accounts without having to login to QuickMail and use the QuickMail DA. Mail can be sent and read with your favorite PowerTalk mail enabled application.

* Mail*Link for PowerTalk MS 1.6 - Mail*Link PT/MS for PowerTalk is a,personal e-mail gateway for PowerTalk users. This gateway will allow PowerTalk users to send and receive mail into the StarNine Mail system or, as formerly known, Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk system. Mail can be sent and read with any PowerTalk mail-enabled application.

* Mail*Link for PowerTalk INET 1.6 - Mail*Link Internet for PowerTalk is a personal gateway for PowerTalk users. This gateway will allow PowerTalk users to send mail via SMTP and receive mail from a POP3 account. Mail can be sent and read with any PowerTalk mail-enabled application.

Problem with Apple Guide Files on Some Power Macintosh Models

If you have a Power Macintosh and have trouble opening the Tutorial, Macintosh Guide, Shortcuts, or other Apple Guide databases, you may have extra files that do not belong on your computer. To solve the problem, follow the steps below:

Step 1
Open the Extensions folder (inside the System Folder) and drag the PowerBook Guide Additions file (if present) to the Trash unless you have a PowerBook.

Step 2
Unless your computer is an AV model, drag the following items to the Trash: Video Guide Additions, Video Player Guide Additions, Speech Guide Additions.

Step 3
Choose Empty Trash from the Special menu.

Step 4
Restart your computer.