Hi! Welcome to this month's edition of A Spider Speaks. My monthly column aims to provide you, the Mac user, with a wealthy source of tips, tricks, and tidbits of useful information. Comments or questions can be sent to me at erik@applewizards.net . I'm always looking for ideas, so fire up your email app and push some bytes my way.
This month, I am going to discuss three relatively unrelated topics. First, a brief discussion of clippings, and their new Internet capabilities, will tempt you to use clippings more frequently. After that, I explain a brief hack for people, such as myself, that would like to resize Sherlock's windows. Wrapping up this month is a brief discussion of Disk Copy, perhaps the most under-used Apple freebie on your hard drive.
 
There's a Flag on the Play for Clipping
This may surprise you, but most Mac users don't 
take advantage of clippings. Are you among
them? Clippings have been around for quite
some time. A great many applications support
them: ClarisWorks, BBEdit, Emailer, SimpleText, and more.
Dragging text, sound, pictures, and even movies to the desktop from a clipping-ready application creates a clipping file. These files can be opened from within the Finder (with the exception of movie clippings, which rely on MoviePlayer) for quick access. Alternatively, clippings can be "dragged and dropped" into clipping-aware applications. Need to insert your address into a bunch of files? Make a clipping of the text and drag it in when necessary.
In addition to providing the basic clipping functionality that has existed since System 7.5.x, Mac OS 8.5 adds new features which enable you to work with all things "i" more easily. Yes: Mac OS 8.5 clippings are Internet intelligent! Have a look at the graphic below.
 
Each of the above files is a clipping: they contain text that can be deposited into an email message or a word processing document (or other things). However, each of them also has a more advanced functionality. Under Mac OS 8.5, the contents of these text clippings is examined for certain types of Internet addresses, including email addresses, FTP sites, nntp (newsgroups), http (websites), and more.
These Internet clipping files, called "Internet location documents" in an Apple technote, possess what could be called "double clickability." Double-click on the erik@applewizards.net one above and your email application (as defined in the Internet control panel) will launch (if necessary) and create a new message addressed to me.
  If you've not yet done so, visit the Internet control panel. Set the
User Mode (in the Edit menu) to Advanced and the "Advanced"
tab (which allows you to choose your default applications, file types, and more) will become available to you.
Though most browsers don't support the creation of clippings (try to drag text from Navigator and you'll simply end up selecting different text), your Internet experience is made much more pleasant with Mac OS 8.5's advanced clipping features. Go ahead, try them out for yourself!
 
I Find that the Window is Too Small
  Sherlock is a great utility. I've used it countless times to find
information in minutes which would have otherwise taken hours.
I quickly collected extra .src (search) files for everything from 3D.com to Videogames.com.
However, one thing bothered me: Sherlock's default window was too small! I could only see about six search engines in the "Search the Internet" pane. With over 50 Sherlock plugins installed on my Mac, it took way too long to scroll through and check/uncheck the ones I wanted. There's no way to resize the window… normally.
 
Never fear, ResEdit is here!
With this freeware wonder,
Sherlock will obey me!
If you too would like to hack
Sherlock, you will see that
the procedure is fairly simple.
Let's get started!
Step 1
Open ResEdit (version 2.1.3 — available on Apple's FTP site and hundreds of other places), then find and open a copy of Sherlock. Never work on the original — always keep it safe until you're sure your hack works. Look for the resource named "wctb" and open it with a double-click.
Step 2
There's only one thing in the wctb resource, so open ID 1200; the "Find Window" resource with another double-click.
Step 3
At the top of the third window (the one you just opened), you'll see something similar to part 3 of the above graphic. Change Sherlock's window type from the second in the list to the first. Save your changes and quit.
Now, open up Sherlock. Head to the "Search the Internet" pane (command-H). Though you won't see a standard resize grabber, you can click and drag in that same area to resize the window. Ahhh, peace of mind.
 
It Copies, It Images, It is Available FREE
  Disk Copy: perhaps Apple's most ignored utility software. Many
Mac users have used Disk Copy to mount those weird .img files that
some Mac OS updates are packaged in, but that's typically the extent of it.
Like much of the Mac OS, understanding how to use just one more tool can make your Mac-using days all the more productive. With productivity in mind, here's a quick list of tasks which Disk Copy is finely suited to handle.
Create New Images
About once a week, I burn a CD. Typically, this CD is a backup of some project folder, my system folder, or some other set of data, files, and applications. Within Toast (the best consumer CD authoring software on the Mac) I can organize my data, but to nowhere near the extent that I can in the Finder.
Instead, there's a better way. 
Within Disk Copy, I choose
"Create New Image" from under
the Image menu (command-N).
After specifying a 12cm full
(CD-ROM) image, I store the
CD.img on a convenient piece
of my hard drive. I then mount
the CD image file by double-
clicking on it (if it wasn't mounted already) and work with it as I would any other disk. I arrange my data as I like, and when I'm done, it's ready to be burnt. The resulting CD-ROM will be an exact copy.
This trick also comes in handy when you're organizing data for a Zip disk or any other form of removable media. Just create a disk image of the correct size, arrange your data, and then use software such as Disk Copy or ShrinkWrap to duplicate your data onto an actual CD, Zip disk, etc.
Copying a Floppy
Have you ever needed to duplicate a floppy disk? Have you ever needed more than one copy of that floppy disk? If you have, or if you will, Disk Copy provides a convenient and fast alternative to the endless click-drag-eject-insert routine.
First create an image from the source floppy disk (command-I as seen above). Next, use the "Make Floppy" command in the Utilities menu (also, command-F) to duplicate that image onto as many floppy disks as you'd like.
Explore Your World
It's a Mac. It's Apple software. Explore! Push buttons, try various options, and see what you can do. You may amaze yourself. Disk Copy can't do harm to anything unless you overwrite a disk with an image (or something similar), so don't worry too much about screwing up. Play with it and see what it can do for you.
 
Speculation of the Month
If Harrison Ford ran for president of the United States, he'd get at least 25% of the vote. I for one would vote for him. He's been President or National Security Advisor so many times it seems as though he'd be a natural.
