Have you noticed that, under System 7.5, your About This Macintosh box no longer identifies your Mac model? It just says something generic, like "PowerBook" or "Power Macintosh" and shows a generic icon. In addition, on an AppleTalk network, System 7.5.x broadcasts this generic name. Mac Identifier contains a database of Macintosh model designations and icons — and solves that problem.
Mac SECRETS Outtakes
What do you do when you’ve got a 1,200-page bestseller that needs updating and expanding? Make it 2,400 pages?
We chose the best, most current, most usable information. It seemed a waste to throw away what we cut — so we decided to stash it on the CD-ROM. This folder contains numerous pieces of information we considered too old (about System 6), too unimportant, or too lengthy to justify their places in the paper edition of this book.
You’ll find each document in several popular word-processing formats: Word (version 4/5/6), ClarisWorks, and MacWrite.
Macman Classic Pro
Macman Classic Pro (isn’t that an oxymoron?) is loosely based on the original Pacman arcade game. It uses only a small amount of memory, looks great in color, and best of all (for those of you who aren’t video-game wizards), has a cheat mode. ‘Nuff said.
Maelstrom
Maelstrom is a fast action arcade-style game for the Macintosh that uses rendered 3D graphics, high-speed animation, and four-channel digitized sound effects. It’s a modernized update to the old arcade game Asteroids.
MenuChoice
MenuChoice is a shareware control panel that enables hierarchical menus under the Apple menu. With it you can open applications, control panel devices, and documents of all kinds quickly and easily using your Apple menu.
MenuChoice is compatible with System 7.5 and provides many features not found in the built-in Apple Menu Options control panel. (You can use MenuChoice in addition to, or instead of, the built-in program, but for speediest operation you should disable Apple Menu Options when you install MenuChoice.)
When you select an item from a submenu, it is added to a list of the ten most recent items used. This list is always available at the top of the Apple menu as a submenu called Recent.
You can even put an alias of your hard disk in the Apple Menu. With it you can access any item on your disk from the Apple Menu. As you can imagine, dealing with submenus that go as deep as your folders can be unwieldy. For this reason, and because the Macintosh operating system is limited to five simultaneous menus, MenuChoice has a feature called Deeper Menus that lets you access menus as deep as you care to go.
MIDI Files
A MIDI file is the musical equivalent of a plain text file: it’s the exchange format between MIDI music programs.
As it turns out, QuickTime 2.0 and later is a MIDI program. As described in Chapter 23, you can import these files into Movie Player, assign each music track to a QuickTime Musical Instrument, and orchestrate your own music!
Movie Play
A fast, simple, fun QuickTime movie player. Lets you cut, copy, and paste chunks of your movies for simple editing.
Movie2Snd
Movie2Snd is a very simple application that extracts soundtracks from QuickTime movies. You can also use Movie2Snd to extract sounds from audio CDs. (See Chapter 23 for more.)
Drop-launch a movie onto the application (or choose a movie from the open dialog). You will be prompted for a location for the resulting sound file. That sound file is a plain ol’ System 7 sound file that can be played by opening (double-clicking)it.
Now Utilities 5.0.2 *
This is the real Now Utilities, the commercial bestseller from Now Software. With this book, you get all eight modules of version 5.0.2, including:
Now FolderMenus lets you “pop up” a menu of any folder’s or volume’s contents just by clicking on the item and holding down the mouse button.
Now Menus gives you the power to customize all of your menus; and by allowing you to create your own Custom Menus, it makes access to files, folders and just about anything else on your Mac faster and easier. Change the order in which items appear in the Apple menu; create your own pull-down and pop-up Custom Menus in which you can place just about anything you use on a regular basis; even select the font and size in which all your menus will be displayed. Now you can choose a small font to fit better on a smaller monitor or a large font that’s easier to view.
Now Profile reports on the status of your system and its configuration. The report can be used to keep track of what’s installed on your system, or to help you troubleshoot any problems you may be experiencing.
Now QuickFiler makes it easy to locate one specific file among the thousands on your hard disk, and then perform any of several handy file management functions on the file (or multiple files). To conserve disk space, you can archive and compress files, too.
Now Save saves your work automatically and protects you from losing data because of unexpected system crashes. Now Save can be set to save your work automatically after a specified number of minutes, keystrokes and/or mouse clicks. As an extra measure of protection, Now Save can also record your every keystroke with its Key Capture feature. If your system crashes three minutes after the last save, you can still lose your unsaved work.
Now Scrapbook takes the concept of the system scrapbook to a new level of power. It lets you create multiple catalogs for storing text, graphics, sounds and even QuickTime movies. You can locate catalog items easily and even modify them using the built-in Clipboard Editor.
Now Startup Manager helps you manage the loading of extensions, control panels, Chooser extensions, fonts, and other startup files from one convenient location. If you experience a system crash that’s related to an extension, Startup Manager will automatically load different groups of extensions for successive restarts and then ask you if the problem is still occurring. After a number of cycles, Now Startup Manager pinpoints the problem for you and offers options for solving it.
Every time you open a document, application or folder, Now Super Boomerang remembers it, adding it to a list of recently-opened files and folders, and helps you get to it quickly next time you need it. When you’re in an Open/Save dialog box and you can’t locate the file or folder you want, Now Super Boomerang can search for items from within this dialog box, saving you time you might otherwise spend switching back to the Finder and manually searching through disks and folders.
Now WYSIWYG Menus lets you customize your font menus so that you know exactly what a font looks like before you choose to include it in a document. It draws all your font names in their actual typefaces (instead of plain old Chicago); lets you reorder fonts within the font menus; and reduces the length of your font list by grouping font families together and attaching them as submenus to each font name. Reducing the size of your font list helps you find the font you need faster!
Olduvai Fonts & Sounds *
Eeps, quacks, and Simple Beeps are never enough. Here’s a useful sampler from Olduvai Software’s commercial Sound Clips sound-effects collection. As an added bonus, here too is a handful of striking, unusual, fun TrueType fonts from Olduvai’s BrushFonts, CoolFonts, and ArtFonts typeface collections.
Oracle
Need a little encouragement at the start of each day? Oracle, a Control Panel that is placed into your System Folder, presents you with a random thoughtful quotation each time you start up your computer.
PhoneBook Plus
PhoneBook Plus is a multi-featured Rolodex program with many niceties for handling that long list of names and addresses. It sports the slickest interface around, extensive phone dialing features, envelope printing, report design and printing, and a robust call timer.
PowerPCheck
Curious about why your brand-spankin’-new PowerPC is running like a drunken cockroach through a three-day-old puddle of raspberry jelly? PowerPCheck ferrets out the truth about your applications. Does the application really have entirely native code? This program can even remove the PowerPC or 68K code from "fat binary" programs.
PowerSecretary demo movie
PowerSecretary is a voice-dictation system for the Mac. With a headset microphone and this software installed, the Mac actually types what you say, enabling you to do all your "typing" — including corrections — with voice control.
This is a short QuickTime movie illustrating what it’s like to dictate to your Mac.
PrintChoice
PrintChoice provides a quick way to select a printer without using the Chooser. It adds a menu in the menu bar that lists your frequently used printers; to change printers, just choose a new printer name.
PrintChoice will also create desktop printers — icons that let you drag-drop documents to print them to a specific printer — without nearly the hassle and expense of QuickDraw GX.
Program Switcher
Getting tired of mousing up to the Application menu to switch between programs? Program Switcher lets you switch between running programs via a simple keystroke.
QuickPop
QuickPop does just two things, but was designed to do them very well. The first is to allow you to assign "Hotkeys" to up to 30 Apple Menu Items, control panels, applications, FKEYs, documents, or monitor depth (colors) or speaker volume settings. When the Hotkeys are pressed from within most any program, the selected item will instantly launch.
The second is to make a menu pop up anywhere on the screen when you hold down a particular key and click. From this pop-up menu you can launch any of those same kinds of files (documents, applications, control panels, etc.).
QuickTime 2.1 *
QuickTime is the extension that lets your Mac record and play digital movies! We’ve licensed it from Apple; see Chapter 23 for details on what it can do.
Remember?
Remember? is an incredibly flexible, colorful, and powerful on-screen calendar. It shows you what you’ve got coming up when you turn on the Mac each morning and can even remind you during the day as each appointment comes up.
ResEdit *
ResEdit, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 21, is Apple’s famous resource editor. It lets you literally examine the guts of a program and make changes to alert messages, command key equivalents, icons, what the menus say, and much more.
ScrapIt Pro
ScrapIt Pro is the Mother of All Scrapbooks. It stores and indexes anything you can copy to the clipboard, import, or drag & drop: sounds, PICTures, text, QuickTime movies, and lots more — all accessible at the click of a mouse! You can print thumbnail pictures or text lists of all items in any Scrapbook file. You can quickly and easily search through all the text items or item names of a scrap file to find what you’re looking for. You can actually edit text, play movies, and copy pictures — right in the window!
SCSIProbe
As we explained in Chapter 30, keeping tabs on the SCSI chain is often half legerdemain and half blind luck. SCSIProbe is an indispensable tool that helps you manage the complexities of your SCSI setup. With SCSIProbe you can determine the device type, vendor, product, and version for every device connected to your bus. It even helps you mount removable devices by a simple keyboard command.
Sleeper
Sleeper is a control panel for desktop Macs and Power Macs that dims the screen and spins down SCSI disk drives after periods of inactivity — just like PowerBooks! Separate "sleep" times can be set for the two features. These features can save energy, reduce noise levels in your work area, and decrease wear to your display and hard disk.
(Sleeper doesn’t spin down IDE hard drives.)
Sleeper will run on any Performa, Macintosh, Power Macintosh, or compatible computer running System 6.0.8 or higher. The screen dimmer requires a color-capable Macintosh, and the disk sleep feature requires a SCSI hard disk.
SmartKeys
SmartKeys is a freeware control panel designed to let you type on the Macintosh as if it were a typewriter. (See Chapter 24 for details on why a typewriter is not a Mac.) Specifically, SmartKeys can perform six different tasks, as follows:
Space: Prevents typing of more than one space.
Dash: Converts two consecutively typed hyphens into a dash.
Quote: Converts typewriter quote marks into true quotation marks.
Ligatures: Converts the character components of a ligature (see Chapter 24) into one.
Kill Doubled Caps: Converts the second of two consecutively typed capitals into a lowercase letter when the second capital is followed by a lower case letter.
Shifted Punctuation: Converts the less than (<) and the greater than (>) math symbols into the comma and period.
Snapz
Snapz lets you quickly and easily capture the image displayed on your monitor and save it to a PICT file for later editing. Snapz offers several unique features over both the built-in Command-Shift-3 capture facility and other screen-capture utilities. Snapz captures images when other programs fail, such as (a) when a screen saver display is on the screen, (b) in the middle of the action in a game, (c) while a menu is pulled down, or even (d) while your Macintosh is starting up. If it is displayed on your screen, Snapz can capture it.
Sound Builder
SoundBuilder records, edits, and saves sounds. It can open or create all kinds of formats: System 7 sounds, -AIFF, AIFC, WAV, and VOC, for example. You can record stereo channels separately (do duets with yourself!); cut, copy, or paste sections of sound; zoom in or out for easier editing; play sounds backwards; and so on.
Startup Screens
As we explained in Chapter 7, you don’t have to stare at the "Welcome to Macintosh" or Mac OS logo during the 20 minutes it takes your Mac to start up. If you place a correctly formatted and named PICT graphics file in your System Folder, you can stare at it, instead, during the startup process. Here are several gorgeous, full-screen, full-color photo images to try out.
StuffIt Expander
Virtually every file or program you can download from an online service or the Internet arrives on your desktop in a specially encoded compact form. Trouble is, there are about 90 million different formats of file compression; if you don’t have the software necessary for re-expanding what you’ve downloaded, you get nothing but the "application not found" message when you double-click.
StuffIt Expander is an all-purpose file re-expander. It turns downloaded files ending with the suffixes .sit, .cpt, and .hqx back into human form; and if you add the companion shareware program DropStuff with Expander Enhancer (also included with this book), it will open .gz, .z, .uu, .ARC, .ZIP, and .uu files, too.
Super Comments
Super Comments lets your Macintosh keep Get Info comments from being erased when the desktop is rebuilt! It also lets you see those comments in the Open File dialog boxes — and even edit them in Save File dialog boxes.
SuperClock!
SuperClock! displays the time and date, in your choice of font and style, near the right end of the menu bar. It can show the date or can turn into a stopwatch with a single click. If you’re using a portable Macintosh, it also displays the battery level; the battery icon includes a little lightning bolt when the battery is charging. This program became so popular Apple incorporated it into the system software (7.5); we’ve included it here in case you’re running any previous version of the system software.
Swoop
Swoop is a fast vertical shoot-’em-up arcade game in which you battle 3-D rendered aliens with a variety of powerful weapons. The gameplay is a combination of frantic rapid-fire activity and even more frantic dodging. Definitely not a game for wusses.
System 7 Pack!
The System 7 Pack! is a System 7 customizer and accelerator. With the System 7 Pack!, you can do all of the following:
Increase the speed of Finder file copies by 300 percent (System 7.0 through 7.1 only); change Command Keys in System 7 Finder; add your own links between applications and documents; remove the annoying application-substitution dialog box; change some menu item names (for example, Empty Trash to Flush Toilet); add a Quit Menu so that you can quit the Finder; remove ZoomRects to speed up opening windows in the Finder; get rid of the annoying rename delay; make the Finder use the 3/9/97 date format; change or eliminate the word alias on every alias you make; and much more!
TechTool
TechTool is an important Mac utility program. It does five things beautifully: (1) Checks your system files for damage. (2) Zaps your parameter RAM (PRAM) in a more thorough way than pressing the usual keystroke, Command-Option-P-R. (3) Rebuilds the desktop; once again, TechTool does better than the usual Command-Option keystroke, since it actually deletes the old desktop file instead of just rebuilding it. (4) Shows system and drive info about your particular Mac. (5) Shows manufacture date and hours of use! Find out when your Mac was made and how many total hours of usage it has had.
TempoEZ *
Tempo is a commercial macro utility, as described in Chapter 22. A macro is a chain of tasks that your Mac performs automatically — when you press a single key. One might type out your return address; another could launch America Online, type in your password, and sign on; another might choose boldface Helvetica 18-point.
A Tempo macro may include keystrokes, menu selections, button clicks, file selections, window drags, a series of steps, and much more. Plus, you can teach Tempo to pause, branch to other macros, repeat macros, and switch to other applications and files.
There are two versions of Tempo: the full-fledged Tempo II Plus and the easier to use, simpler TempoEZ; both are sold by Affinity. With this book, you get a special version of TempoEZ that comes with a number of useful ready-to-use macros. You can create five new macros per application you use in your work, plus ten macros of your own that work in every program.
Usually, you play a macro by pressing a key or key combination, such as F1 or Command-A. In Tempo, these trigger keystrokes are called key codes.
The Tilery
Here’s what an Apple programmer can build in his spare time: a graceful, beautifully-designed shareware application-switcher for System 7. The Tilery puts up an icon tile for each application you have running under System 7. If you click a tile, the corresponding application comes to the front. Option-clicking hides the previous application as the new application comes forward. If The Tilery’s tiles are all hidden behind other windows, moving the mouse to a hot spot in a corner of the main screen brings them forward.
To Do!
To Do! is a desk accessory that helps you keep track of everything you are supposed to remember to do. You can create topics and things-to-do within each topic. Topics and To-dos can have notes attached to them; the program can sort alphabetically; you can assign priorities to your To-dos; and when you take care of one of those tasks, you can check it off. You can also print in a number of different formats.
TypeIt4Me
TypeIt4Me is a typing saver. Your cheerful authors used it to write this book, and in the process only had to type about 70% of the pages in your hands. TypeIt4Me did the rest — by expanding abbreviations as we typed.
And where, you may ask, did these abbreviations come from? As you go about your daily life, you teach TypeIt4Me. You make up your own abbreviations for words you use a lot: you might use Mc for Macintosh, bc for because, aol for America Online, and so on. Over time, your word list grows, and the amount of typing you save grows! It’s good for people with repetitive-stress disorders, it’s good for people who want to speed up their typing (and increase accuracy), it’s great for people in technical fields, and it’s a blessing for anyone who uses the Mac for typing.
X-Words
X-Words is Scrabble, really. A fantastic electronic edition of Scrabble.
Zonkers! Sampler *
Want watercolored windows? Striped scroll bars? Mauve menus? It’s yours for the clicking. The power to wreak your own personal havoc with the look and feel of the Mac interface is here now — in the form of Zonkers, from Nova Development. Here are 20 icons (chosen from the hundreds in the Zonkers collection) for you to play with.
Use these to dress up your own folders and documents, using the Get Info command, as explained in Chapter 1.
ZTerm
ZTerm is an award-winning shareware telecommunications program that you can use to dial bulletin boards or other Macs. ZTerm gives you a Phone List file that can hold many Dialing setups. Each setup contains the phone number, port settings, and many other settings. Each dial setup appears in the Dial menu to allow easy connection to all of the services you connect to.
