A Zillion Kajillion Rhymes is a fantastic rhyming dictionary — commercial software from Eccentric Software. For anyone who writes songs, poems, limericks, or birthday cards, or for anyone who just loves good fun software, the wait is over.
Add/Strip
One of the most annoying aspects of the Internet (and IBM compatibles) is getting text files and e-mails filled with strange line breaks and annoying garbage characters. Add/Strip is your revenge. It neatly turns such hard-to-read text files into easy-to-read regular text.
Anagrams
An anagram is a phrase created by scrambling the letters of another phrase. For example, an anagram of information superhighway is "New utopia? Horrifying sham!"
You just type in a word — your name, for instance — and this program automatically spews out thousands of English phrases, or pseudo-phrases, composed of those rearranged letters. Anagrams (the program) offers several clever methods of weeding out the junky nonsense phrases, making it much easier for you to locate the meaningful ones.
Apeiron
Apeiron is a wild high-speed arcade-style variant on the old Centipede game. According to the author: "During a port through the looking glass, the mirror shatters and your ethereal energy (you know, the stuff that allows you to get up and go to work on a Monday morning) is trapped within one of the crystal shards. Immediately the residents of the mushroom patch sense your presence. Led by the Pentipede, these critters relentlessly hunt the crystal, intent upon sucking the trapped energy out. Luckily you are not defenseless; with plasma cannon blazing, you must hold out as long as possible."
AppDisk
AppDisk is a shareware RAM disk application. What is a RAM disk? It’s a piece of software that lets you use some extra RAM memory as a really fast hard disk (and extend the life of a PowerBook battery; see Chapters 9 and 14). The disk appears on your desktop just like any other hard disk, and you can copy files to it normally. When you turn off your Mac or restart, the contents of the RAM disk are lost — so AppDisk has several options to automatically save a copy of the RAM disk contents onto your hard disk.
AreaCodeFinder
AreaCodeFinder is a fast, elegant way to find out the area code for a certain city — or vice versa. It has over 2,400 American cities listed, and you can add your own. There’s even a US map, so you can make sure you’re not about to wake up somebody in another time zone.
Art Explosion! Sampler *
Art Explosion is among the most impressive professional clip art collections ever assembled: 40,000 images on five CD-ROM discs, accompanied by a paperback visual index. This folder includes a dozen sample EPS images from that collection.
A graphics program (such as Color It, also included with this book), a page-layout program like PageMaker, or a word processor like WordPerfect or Word.
This special collection of EPS files is brought to you by special arrangement with Nova Development, 800-395-NOVA.
ArtValve
Don’t you just hate it when you log onto America Online and end up sitting there, for the remaining 45 minutes before bedtime, waiting for art to get downloaded — wave after wave of onscreen graphics that the AOL computers deem it necessary to force-feed us over the modem? Time spent waiting for art you don’t particularly want is money wasted.
Now you can shut off the art. ArtValve tricks AOL and eWorld into believing that you already have the necessary art. It does so by slapping a generic AOL or eWorld icon into the appropriate vacant spot on your screen. You can still access whatever features lie behind those icons (by clicking); you just don’t get the unwanted art.
Before Dark
If you, like millions of other Mac fans, are getting a little tired of that boring gray desktop pattern, and you don’t have System 7.5 with its Desktop Patterns program, Before Dark is a godsend. This little application fills in your desktop with one of dozens of stunning full-color textures or patterns, the likes of which you could never create in the relatively lame General Controls panel.
Bitstream Fonts *
By special arrangement with Bitstream, one of the oldest Mac typeface foundries, we’ve included with this book a pair of commercial TrueType font families from Bitstream’s vast library of typefaces. One of them is Humanist, the font used for big headings in this document (like “The SECRETS Software” at the very top of this page).
After trying out these fonts, check the back of the book for the discount coupon to order the full Bitstream starter collection of 25 fonts and the exclusive Star Trek Fonts collection.
Blood
It’s totally useless! But who can live without it? Blood is the painless way to get drops of blood on your screen. They’ll float all over your windows and you can even drag them around. And it’s so much easier to clean up than the real thing.
Cache-22
As you may remember from Chapters 12 and 13, nothing gooses a Mac’s speed like a high-speed memory cache. But how do you know if your Mac has one? And if you just installed, say, a Level 2 cache into your Power Mac, how do you know if it’s working?
This program tells you what PowerPC chip you have, what caches, and how big they are.
Chiral
Cross the addictive real-time flipping action of Tetris with the thinking of molecular science, and you’ve got Chiral, a visually stunning game from Ambrosia Software. Your test tube is filling up with atoms. Can you bond them into molecules fast enough — and keep your molecules stable?
Clockometer
How fast is your Mac, anyway? This handy utility from Newer, Inc., tells you at a glance — in MHz.
Color Coordinator *
This commercial control panel lets you switch your screen’s color setting (256 colors, black-and-white, and so on) simply by pressing a key.
More impressively, it can automatically switch to the appropriate color depth as you switch from application to application, without any effort on your part: 24-bit color for Photoshop, black-and-white for word processing, and so on. Color Coordinator is published by Casady & Greene.
Color It! 2.3 *
Color It! is a powerful commercial 24-bit painting and retouching program. It’s a program along the lines of Photoshop — but it’s quicker to load, simpler to learn, offers multiple Undos, and requires half as much memory.
Color It! lets you either create new color paintings or retouch scanned photos — from black-and-white all the way up to millions of colors. It reads MacPaint, PICT, TIFF, Photoshop, and EPS files and offers an impressive list of features: multiple Undo; work with multimegabyte files even with limited RAM; editable tool palette; custom patterns; image masking; and image-processing filters.
ColorSwitch
Some programs require certain monitor settings to run properly. Rooting around for your Monitors control panel quickly becomes tiresome, especially when you have to do it often. ColorSwitch adds to your menu bar an icon from which you can select a different color depth.
Volume control is an added bonus. You can instantly change the sound volume from ColorSwitch’s pull down menu.
Conflict Catcher 3 Demo *
Conflict Catcher 3 is a startup-file manager. If you press the spacebar as your Mac starts up, you’re shown a list of every extension and control panel in your Mac. At this pause in the Mac’s start-up sequence, you can switch extensions on or off (by clicking); rearrange the loading order (by dragging); view them sorted by type, name, or loading order; group them into mutually required, or mutually incompatible, clusters; or group them into named subsets. Conflict Catcher can actually show the names of your extension icons as they load.
Best of all: if you’re having some mysterious glitch or crash, you click on CC’s Conflict Test button. After a few restarts, CC triumphantly names the problem extension and even offers to turn it off for you.
For Power Mac users, CC has an added attraction. Unfortunately, pre-Power Mac, nonnative extensions exact a serious overall speed penalty on these machines. CC’s Report function tells you which extensions aren’t written in native code, and even hints at which ones will slow down your Power Mac the most.
This demo version expires 72 hours after you first use it — which is long enough to get out of whatever extension conflict you’re currently suffering!
Control Strip modules
These modules add additional functions to Apple’s Control Strip.
Control Panels Strip provides a fast, easy way to open control panels, and access to items in the Extensions, Control Strip Modules, and Startup Items folders.
Terminator Strip provides a variety of functions, including hiding or showing of the Control Strip depending on the mouse location, quitting all applications, quitting the Finder (saving precious RAM), shutting down, and much more.
BunchOApps lists the most recently run programs (and also programs you want to remain permanently in the list). Selecting an application from either list launches the application.
Dialog View
A persistent annoyance about the Macintosh interface: although file names can be up to 31 characters long, the Standard File dialog boxes (produced by choosing Open or Save from the File menu) don’t display that many characters. In System 7, long file names are displayed in compressed type, but that’s not a very satisfactory solution.
Dialog View lets you change the appearance of directory dialog boxes (Open and Save). You can control what kind of icons are used, increase the height and width of the file list, and set the font for the file list.
Disinfectant
Disinfectant, a freeware application and extension, is one of the very best antivirus programs available for the Macintosh. It both recognizes and eradicates 25 Mac viruses and all known variations of them. Disinfectant also recognizes many possible unknown variations. It detects the viruses and, when possible, repairs files infected by the viruses.
Disinfectant also includes a virus protection extension (INIT) that loads at startup and continually protects your Mac from infection by any of the known non-HyperCard Mac viruses.
Disk Rejuvenator
It’s a real bummer: you try to paste a new icon onto your hard drive, but you get the bizarre error message "The command could not be completed, because it could not be found." You’re in the bundle-bit snafu described in Chapter 33. This program from Aladdin Systems cures it.
DiskFit Direct *
Don’t get stuck without a backup of your important files just because your version of Incredibly Complicated Backup Software for Incredibly Complicated Software, Ltd. is just too, well, complicated. DiskFit Direct, a commercial program from Dantz Development, makers of Retrospect, is an incredibly simple backup program. Just three clicks and your whole hard drive is backed up!
Best of all, DiskFit Direct backs up your icons as icons — it doesn’t code them into some special file format, as other backup programs do.
DragAnyWindow
Doesn’t this always seem to happen? There’s some information you need to see in order to finish filling in a dialog box, but the information is covered by that very dialog box, and the dialog box is not movable! DragAnyWindow changes that by allowing you to, well, drag any window.
DragStrip 1.0 *
DragStrip, a commercial program from Natural Intelligence, is a PowerPC accelerated, great-looking, AppleScript-savvy launcher — a floating palette whose tiles represent your favorite files and programs. Click any tile to launch the associated item. Specialized tiles do things like change speaker volume or monitor settings, pop up a calendar, or, interestingly, rout a drag-and-dropped file to a predefined destination folder.
Included with this book are two editions of DragStrip: a complete, fully functioning 1.0 version and a non-saving demo version of 2.0.
DropStuff
DropStuff makes the creation of Stuffit compressed archives a piece of cake. Simply drag the file you’d like to compress onto the DropStuff icon, let go, and the program automatically compresses it, creating the new compressed file and adding ".sit" (which is pretty much universally used to let people know that they’re dealing with Stuffit compressed files) to the end of the original document name.
Dvorak Keyboard Layouts
When Charles Sholes designed the 100-year-old typewriter keyboard layout we still use today, he was trying to design something as clumsy as possible — he didn’t want fast typing to jam his prototype typewriter. August Dvorak, in 1930, designed an improved layout, in which all the frequently used letters are directly beneath your fingers. Typists swear that the Dvorak layout lets them type faster, more accurately, and with far less finger movement than the traditional layout.
Fortunately, you have a Mac; you can see for yourself. Simply drop this keyboard layout icon onto your System Folder and select it with your Keyboard control panel (or your Keyboard menu, if you’ve made yours appear as directed in Chapter 21).
Easy Envelopes+
Why kill yourself trying to layout envelopes in Microsoft Word 6000.0.1? Simple and inexpensive, Easy Envelopes acts as an electronic address book and envelope printer. It stores thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers, which you can search for and print in any of a variety of styles and fonts.
Easy KEYS
Why let your function keys, that row of keys across the top of your keyboard — F1, F2, and so on — stand idle? Easy KEYS lets you put ‘em to use. Use this control panel to get your function keys (or a combination of keys) to launch applications, desk accessories, or control panels.
Eclipse Screen Saver
Flying toasters and exploding rabbits are fun for a while, but perhaps you’re getting a little tired of using a screen saver that takes up huge amounts of disk space, devours memory, slows down your Macintosh, and causes inexplicable crashes. Eclipse is an application, so it avoids the problems of extension-based screen savers. Eclipse displays the current time as a floating clock, graphics (PICTs, JPEGs, and GIFs), or QuickTime movies from a folder full of choices.
FC Text-Picture
If you are one the elite, you know how to send your actual, visual signature — or an icon or any other graphic — to another person by e-mail (see the figure below). Of course, that’s impossible; everyone knows e-mail is text.
But FC Text-Picture converts any picture on the Clipboard into an "image" you can paste into an America Online, eWorld, or FirstClass e-mail. Of course, it’s actually just text — but at 1-point size, and colored appropriately, so it looks like you’ve pasted a graphic right into your e-mail! No one will be able to figure out how you did it!
File Buddy
Ever get a large number of files with some strange suffixes appended to the end of their names? Or discovered that once you’ve moved a bunch of files from one hard drive to another you’re left with a mass of aliases that no longer connect to their original sources? When you have to deal with a lot of files or folders at the same time, you can’t beat File Buddy. It can find files using an extensive set of search criteria, modify a bunch of files’ names at the same time, create custom icons, and create aliases. It can also find empty files and folders, duplicate files, unattached aliases, and unused preference files.
File Buddy is also fantastic for the kinds of file editing described in this book: making something invisible, changing a file’s secret creator or type codes, and so on.
Flash-It
Flash-It is a shareware screen-capture utility. Flash-It defines up to five screen-capture key combinations (called HotKeys). Each HotKey performs one of the following functions:
* Captures a portion of the screen image to the Clipboard.
* Leaves the captured image in the Clipboard or saves it to a PICT-based disk file or to the Scrapbook or sends it to the printer.
* Lets you choose the destination of the image on the fly.
Flash-It works even while menus are being displayed. It can capture only the frontmost window (or alert/dialog box) or only the displayed menu; if you want, you can capture the pointer (or cursor) as part of the image. Flash-It can scale up or down the captured image from 5 to 3200 percent, in 5 percent steps, works with multiple monitors, and lets you specify the document creator for the PICT-based disk files.
FlashWrite ][
FlashWrite ][ is a replacement for that dusty old Apple Note Pad. It allows an unlimited number of pages that can hold tens of thousands of characters and that can even be assigned names! The names appear in a sorted alphabetical index, so you can easily find the page you’re looking for. It will also find text on any page, import or export text, and count words. Plus, with FlashWrite ][ Opener installed (an option), you can assign a combination of keys to automatically open FlashWrite ][ so you can immediately get your thoughts down.
Folder Icon Maker
Folder Icon Maker is a simple, effective program that will help you visually keep track of what’s inside your folders. To use Folder Icon Maker, just drag an application or document onto the Folder Icon Maker icon. A new folder will be created with a miniature version of the application’s icon pasted onto it!
Googool Eyes
The search is over! For all of us who have been desperate to have a pair of onscreen eyes follow our cursor around, Googool Eyes is the answer. Actually, this little program can be more than a silly RAM-waster: if you have multiple monitors or a PowerBook screen that’s hard to read, this short program can help you find those "lost" cursors.
GURU
GURU is a fast, slick program that tells you about your Mac model’s RAM possibilities: the amount of RAM your computer can handle, how many slots you can fill, and what combinations of chips you’ll need to reach a certain maximum amount of RAM.
Helium
You’ve probably said it yourself: "Balloon Help is a good thing! But I hate the drudgery of having to go all the way to the Help Menu, turn on Balloon Help, point at the thing I want help with, and then turn Balloon Help off again every time I want help with one little thing!"
Helium puts an end to that drudgery forever. It lets you choose a key combination that inflates Help Balloons instantly. When you let go of the keys, the Balloons disappear. It’s almost magical!
If that weren’t enough, you can also choose the font and size of the text in the Balloons, and you can hide the Balloon Help icon in the menu without giving up access to those special Help Menu items.
Holiday Lights
Holiday Lights (based on the wildly popular Xmas Lights program) is an entertaining application that places flashing light bulbs around the edge of your screen, as though a (well-insulated) elf had crawled into your computer through the disk drive slot and stapled them there. The lights flash in the background while you continue to work; it’s not just a screen-saver! The "bulbs" include standard Christmas tree lights, chili peppers, stockings, holly, snowmen, happy faces, and more — and you can create your own bulbs using ResEdit or a similar program.
Holiday Lights also includes cheery background music, using Apple’s QuickTime Musical Instruments (see Chapter 23) and a built-in snowy screen saver to put you in the holiday spirit. It’s a multimedia extravaganza!
Kaboom! Sounds *
When you grow bored with the simple beep or the other spare sounds that come with your Mac System software, it’s time for a change. And we’ve got it for you, in the form of several saucy, sassy sound files from the award-winning Kaboom! collection of Mac sound effects from Nova Development. The back pages of this book contain special offers for the complete Kaboom! package.
KeyQuencer
Cut down the likelihood of repetitive stress injury by reducing repetition! When you find yourself traveling to the same menus to make the same choices over and over again, you can turn to KeyQuencer. With the included extensions, KeyQuencer lets you assign combinations of keys to automate certain activities, like capturing a screen image, opening a file or a folder, launching an application, making menu selections, typing a key combination, clicking on a button, changing the number of colors on your screen, dialing a phone number, changing the speaker’s volume, switching to another application, and much more. It can even insert boilerplate text.
KeyQuencer is more difficult to figure out than some macro programs, in part because there’s no single manual. On the other hand, it uses much less RAM than the larger commercial macro programs, and has some unique and powerful features.
Label Secrets Pro *
Label Secrets Pro is a completely original and exclusive program, and nobody has it but you (and your fellow SECRETS buyers).
Your cheerful authors dreamed up the idea for Label Secrets when writing Chapter 2, which deals with the utter pointlessness of the Label menu in System 7. We thought: if only it could be made to do something useful!
Now it does. Each time you turn on your Mac, the Label menu at your Finder desktop displays a different message containing one of the Macintosh Secrets from this book. It shows an actual Macintosh Secret every day for a year, right on your Mac screen!
Label Secrets Pro adds two powerful features. First, you can now open the control panel and click forward or backward through the secrets (use the Prev and Next buttons). Now you don’t have to keep restarting the Mac to read the next secret — and it’s easy to review a secret you read the other day.
Second, there’s a Label Secrets Pro secret. If you’re clever, you’ll figure out the hidden method that lets you add your own secrets (or edit ours), right in the control panel!
