23rd July 2001
It's okay to feed your doc scraps; he'd love 'em. Really! You can pull those smilies and flower symbols from things like MSN Messenger and other apps, and copy them right into a scrap-aware application. Wordpad and Microsoft Word support this, as do other programs which understand Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). Not all OLE-aware apps are scrap-aware, however. You can test this by dragging an emoticon from MSN Messenger to the desktop, where it will be identified as a Shell Scrap Object (and thusly carry a .SHS extension at the file system level). Ah, do you not know how to create a graphical emoticon in MSN Messenger? Type a colon followed immediately by a close parenthesis symbol and the result will make you smile. Explorer may hide the .SHS extension from you, however -- which is big reason virus-writers like to use it. What may seem like a file with a .JPG extension might actually be vicious code taking advantage of the free stealth features Microsoft included with Windows. Back to business here! Test other applications for scrap awareness by dragging this newly created scrap from your desktop into the application and see what happens. With any luck, you'll see that emoticon smiling right back at you. In some instances, you can bypass the scrap creation by dragging and dropping to and from the OLE apps.