Well, it's that time of year again. The progression of the seasons brings us full circle 'round to the Winter Solstice, and with it, the generically inclusive Holiday Season. This provides a great occasion to discuss the shareware system of software distribution. It's easy to forget that shareware is not free software. Shareware authors pour many long hours into the creation of their programs, and by paying the shareware fee, you're not only encouraging the development of more Macintosh software, you're also saying "Hey, this is pretty cool/fun/useful! Way to go!" Money does indeed talk, after all.
So this Holiday Season, I would encourage one and all to take a little tour of your hard drives (and removable media) and notice which of your applications (and extensions and control panels) are shareware. Ask yourself: do I use this often? Have I paid for it? Isn't it worth the very small fee the author is asking?
Then, send in that fee. If you do, a pleasant warm feeling will spread from the center of your chest to the tips of your extremities. And you'll be sharing the milk of human kindness with some very hard-working and oft-neglected elves, the Macintosh shareware developers.
Peace on Earth, good will toward all life forms.
 
Yo Mama
 
YO!
With the advent of soundsets in Mac OS 8.5's Appearance Manager, the Mac has become a whole lot noisier, and I mean that in a good way. Now you can have bleeps and bloops and squiggles for nearly every system event: opening and closing windows, dragging icons around, etc. But there's still one area of your Mac's aural interface that remains static: the system beep. Once you've set the beep in your Monitors & Sound control panel, it just stays the same: every time your system wants your attention, beep. Beep. Blah.
Not anymore! YO! by Clixsounds automatically randomizes your alert sounds. It comes with a set of 10 funky alert sounds (only three of which are available until you register), and it makes it easy to record your own alert sounds, all from within a snazzy control console. YO! (v.1.0, Oct '98, 1895 K) can be registered for $20, or you can send away for a YO! CD-ROM with thousands of alert sounds for only $29.95. Download YO! from http://www.clixsounds.com/ and be delighted every time your Mac says Yo!
 
Trippy
 
Rainbox
If MacPaint had been developed in the late 1960s, the result might be something like Rainbox by Alex Rosen. This psychedelic paint program creates pulsating, swirling trails… the colors, man, the colors! Built-in shapes include smiley faces, the Apple logo, ankhs, the Grateful Dead logo, and even Clarus the dogcow! You just drag a shape around the screen and Rainbox does the rest. The results can be saved as a PICT file for use in other applications.
Rainbox (v.1.2, April 96, 98 K) requires your monitor to be set to 256 colors, and includes a fader for use with the Darkside of the Mac screensaver. And it's absolutely free, man! Download Rainbox from http://www.tiac.net/users/axlrosen/rainbox.html and experience the grooviness that is palette animation!
 
Ch-ch-ch-changes
 
A Better Finder Creators & Types
In the Oct/98 'Warehouse, we looked at several excellent contextual menu plug-ins — let's add one more to the list. A Better Finder Creators & Types by PublicSpace allows you to easily change the Type and Creator codes of multiple files. A file's Type code consists of four characters which tell your Finder what kind of file it is. Applications have the Type code APPL, for example. The Creator code is especially important for documents; it ensures that the document remains attached to the proper application, usually the one that created it. These codes also let the Finder know what kind of icon to display. But let's say you wanted to change a SimpleText document so that double-clicking it would cause it to be opened by BBEdit Lite. You'd change TEXT/ttxt to TEXT/R*ch. There are many utilities to let you do this, but ABFC&T lets you do it from within a convenient contextual menu, and it allows you to batch-edit this information for several files at once.
The demonstration version of A Better Finder Creators & Types (v.1.0, Oct '98, 566K) is limited to changing only five files at a time. ABFC&T is "cheapware" that costs only US $5. You can download it from http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderCreatorsAndTypes/ , and while you're there, you can check out the other offerings from PublicSpace: A Better Finder Select and A Better Finder Rename.
 
Yet Another Text Editor
 
SimpleEdit
Back in June of this year, I discussed my quixotic quest for the perfect text-editing application. As I recall, the results were somewhat inconclusive. Another strong candidate is SimpleEdit by Thomas Carstensen of Evatac Software. SimpleEdit is quick and clean, and since it doesn't use the TextEdit part of the Mac Toolbox, it handles documents larger than 32 K. SimpleEdit gets bonus coolness points for being one of the first third-party apps I found to utilize Mac OS 8.5's Navigation Services instead of the standard Open and Save dialog boxes. Not only is SimpleEdit an outstanding replacement for SimpleText, it also offers some features that you'd normally find in higher-end word processing programs (think Word). Powerful search and replace capabilities, text manipulation, and the ability to run simple AppleScripts from within the application (like exporting your document to Claris Emailer) make SimpleEdit a powerhouse that remains easy to use.
SimpleEdit (v.3.3.3, Sept. '98, 567 K) is freeware, but you do have to give your email address in order to download it. For a word processor this good, that's a small price to pay. Check it out at http://www.evatac.com/products/SimpleEdit/ .
 
'Warehouse Trivia Contest
  This month, the prizes are five copies of CDFinder by Norbert M.
Doerner. With CDFinder you can catalogue anything that
spins: your hard drive, Zip and Jaz disks, floppies, you name it. See our full review in the Feb/98 Apple Wizards, or surf on over to http://people.frankfurt.netsurf.de/nmd/ and check it out for yourself. Thanks again for the donation, Norbert!
You know the drill: with "Contest" in the subject line, email your answers to brian@applewizards.net .
The Five Contest Questions for December 1998
1. During what sporting event did the first Macintosh commercial air?
2. In Mac OS 8.5, what has replaced the Find File desk accesory?
3. What was the project to run the Mac OS on Intel hardware called? (Hint: see Apple History, Nov/98.)
4. What is Apple's speech recognition technology called?
5. What keys would you hold down during startup to zap the PRAM?
The winners for October were "batrico" and Steven Poleske. An additional copy of StuffCM sadly went unclaimed. You can win even if you don't know all the answers, so come on and enter, people!
