April Mac Shareware

This month we look at some toys to brighten a Mac user's workday, including as a cheeky moose, a set of robot personalities, animated Finder icons, eyes that follow your every action, and randomised sounds for the Finder. There's also an update of an old favourite.

By Steve Cooper

You can choose which voice the Moose will use (Fred is closest to the original), how often he'll speak and blink, and alter various aspects of his appearance.

The Moose now responds to commands via AppleScript, and can make use of plug-in animations. He'll also repeat his last comment or joke on request. With over 1,300 supplied phrases, repetition is rarely a problem.

Of course, the fun part of the Moose is composing new phrases for him, and the Phrase Editor makes this easy. Apple's speech technology has come a long way since the days of the original Moose, and phrases can be written in plain English, no need for the complex phonetic spelling of yesteryear.

In the author's words: It's useless. It's weird. It's the Moose!

DeskBots hands over charge of your desktop to a group of loquacious robots. Described as 'the robotic talking desktop companion', DeskBots allows you to choose among a number of provided 'personalities', which vary not only in appearance, but in their libraries of comments and their attitudes to life.

Your chosen DeskBot, provided with your name and those of your family members, will personalise its spoken comments accordingly. It will offer 'helpful' computing advice, warn you of impending doom, alert you to the presence of excess matter in the universe, and generally do everything it can to distract you from productivity.

The free version of DeskBots has everything you need to try out the program, including several personalities, phrase files, scripting examples, sound files, and full documentation. Its functionality is limited, however, to changing personality appearance, voices, background sounds and user names. With registration and payment comes the ability to edit the standard phrases, make use of the User Phrase and Vocabulary files, control DeskBots via AppleScript, and benefit from the different phrase files associated with the personalities.

The Kineticon Editor is also used to activate the animated icons you wish to use, from the set provided. Simply launch the Editor and preview the desired icons. Then, copy and paste the icons to the desired Finder items as usual; that is, by pasting into the items' Get Info boxes.

As well as icons for folders, applications and documents, the provided set includes three System alert icons, and one for the Trash.

An animation is constructed in the Editor as a simple sequence of any number of icons. The individual icons need to be drawn in a separate program because Kineticon has no paint tools. The animation can be set to play once, loop, play back and forth, or play for a set time. The whole process is commendably simple, without need to resort to a resource editor.

Kinetic Creations' Web site houses a multitude of 'kines', as the animations are called, so you need never get tired of your collection.

Improving on the veteran Eyeballs INIT, this simple control panel provides the menu bar with eyes not only with colour, but also with a surprising range of options. You can change the eyelid and iris colours, the time between blinks, and the time to sleep. You can choose whether the eyes will follow the action in tandem, or move independently. There's even a choice of skin colour.

To suit your monitor and applications, the eyes can be positioned just beside the last menu item, or at the right end of the menu bar, or at a fixed position of your choice.

MyEyes can also make use of External Eyes Sets, and full instructions for designing you own Eyes Sets, based on the standard sets, is provided. ResEdit is the only tool required.

A number of sounds are provided, but to make the most of this program, you will want to import more sounds in SND, WAV, AIFF, AU and other formats, or even record your own. All this can be done from within Yo! Not surprisingly, the publisher sells a CD of 1,000 such sounds at extra cost. You can also import your System's own sounds.

Before registering, you are limited to using three sounds only, but these can be prioritised and allocated a volume level, and System sounds can be imported. This is sufficient to give you a feel for the program.

Yo! is a little short on functions when all said and done, but it does have a commercial polish.

It's also worth mentioning the Best of Kaleidoscope page at http://macplaza.net/ksbest/kstMain.shtml, which is well worth a visit if you're wondering whether to get interested in Kaleidoscope, or need some new schemes.