Do your friends laugh at you because you only have enough memory to run a three measly extensions and one of them is your CD driver? Do you lose the office power-user contest because you only have half of the NOW Utilities installed? Does the guy down the hall whose Mac loads fifty extensions really annoy you?
When your Mac starts up, Extension NV simply makes it look like more extensions and control panels are loading than really are. It patches no traps, uses no memory after it's done, cleans up after itself nicely, and then quits, leaving your machine like it found it--and equally stable :-). Impress those who are impressed by forty extensions loading on startup. Or surprise that co-worker who has gone overboard with extensions by making it look like he is loading another three dozen every startup.
Using Extension NV
ENV requires System 7. Drop it on your system folder and restart. You will see many additional icons march across your screen on startup, complete with disk activity that makes it look like you are loading many more extensions than you really are. If you get tired of watching all those extensions go by, hold down your mouse for a second or two, then ENV will stop and your system will continue to boot normally.
Extension NV's name starts with a tilde (~) so the icons that look like extensions will show with the other extensions, and the icons that look like control panels will load with the other control panels.
One caveat: some older extensions out there that load after ENV are not smart enough to put their icon anywhere but the bottom row of the monitor and so will look kind of funny. This is not a problem with Extension NV; you just may see a purely cosmetic bug in the other extension for the first time.
Changing the Icons
You can use ResEdit to change the icons ENV displays. ENV sequentially displays ICN# resources starting with ICN# number 129. So simply paste an ICN# family into ENV with ResEdit, and make sure the icons are numbered sequentially from 129. If you want to copy a Finder icon, you can get info on it, and copy the icon there. As far as I know, there is no limit to the number of icons ENV will display, although I have never managed to get enough for them to disappear off the top of the screen.
Why I Wrote It
A friend of mine pointed out to me that many Mac people consider the number of icons that march across their screen at startup a reflection how how much expertise they have. (A phallic symbol if you're a Freudian.) If you know one of those people, you probably get the joke. I have always laughed at people who never met an extension they didn't uninstall, then wondered why their system is unstable and slow. This is your chance to look just like them, only without the unstable and slow part.
About the Icons
I downloaded all these icons from Info-Mac--thanks. Various icons came from Rich Dellinger, Kim Ji-Hyun, Jay Boersma, Matt Slot, and Ronald Ferguson. Thanks also to Gregory Robbins for Folder Icon Maker and the ShowInitIcon team.
Disclaimer
Although ENV does absolutely nothing unusual or skanky (from a programmer's perspective :-), I haven't given it much of a workout, so use it at your own risk. I honestly don't think there are any hidden bugs--it's only about forty lines of code not including the ShowInitIcon library. In the unlikely event that it hoses your system, I cannot be responsible, but I would like a bug report if possible to Sterling_Augustine@shodor.org.
Distribution
Extension NV 1.0 is freeware. Have fun. But I do retain the copyright.
