This little panel works only on specific models (such as the LC 500 series, Color Classic, and Mac TV), which tend to be Macs with built-in color monitors. These monitors have no knobs to adjust; therefore, you use this control panel to tweak the brightness, contrast, and automatic dimming. If you have any other model, toss this item.
Sound & Displays
For a brief, unhappy moment, Apple computer released this horribly confusing control panel as a replacement for what had been two control panels: Monitors and Sound. Only the first-release 7200, 7500, and 8500 Power Mac models carried this control panel.
The interface has four panes that correspond to video (input and output) and sound (input and output). You have to double-click an item in one of the four directories to open a window containing the options you actually want to change. For example, if you double-click the Display field, you get what looks like the older Monitors control panel. To change your error beep, you click the System Sound button; another window opens, containing what used to be in the Sound control panel.
Serial Switch
For the Mac IIfx and Quadra 950 only; otherwise, out it goes. This tiny on/off switch affects the modem port speed — and, therefore, your success at getting MIDI software and modem programs to work. Switch the setting to Compatible if you use any kind of music software, or it’s bye-bye, MIDI.
Sharing Setup
Each Mac connected to a network must have its own identity. The Sharing Setup control panel allows you to assign your Mac a unique network name and to identify yourself as its owner (and, therefore, the one who determines which items on your Mac are shared and which aren’t).
Mostly, however, you use this control panel to turn File Sharing on and off. For details on File Sharing, networking, and this control panel, see Chapter 32.
Sound
Why should you be content with a nondescript beep when you can make your Mac squeak, giggle, roar, burp, or play the theme song from “Hee Haw”?
With the Sound control panel , you can change your Mac’s alert sound, add sounds to and delete sounds from its repertoire, and adjust the overall volume of your Mac speaker. If you have the new Sound control panel (below), you also can record and play from your Mac’s CD-ROM drive, if you have one.
 
If you have the new Sound control panel, it may take you a while to get used to its multiple-panel approach. The point is that each time you change the setting in the pop-up menu, the controls change in the panel portion. Chapter 14 covers some of the effects you can achieve by using different settings.
When the Sound panel’s pop-up menu is set to Alert Sounds (the only setting for the older control panel), you see the Mac’s small set of alert sounds: a quack, the Wild Eep, a droplet, and so on. To play a sound, click its name in the list or click the volume adjustment bar. Whichever sound is selected when you close the control panel becomes the standard alert sound. That’s an important fact to remember if you have long sounds in your arsenal, which are utterly annoying as error beeps (because the Mac is incapacitated until the sound finishes playing).
Record a sound
To record sounds, your Mac needs some kind of microphone. Some models (Classic, LC, IIsi, and so on) require (and came with) the old-style gray Mac mike. Later models (Quadra 605, Power Mac, and so on) require the longer-plugged PlainTalk mike ($20). And if your really old model doesn’t even have a sound-input jack on the back, you have to buy a mike that plugs into your modem port, like a MacRecorder (Macromedia).
To record, click the Add button, which opens a panel with tape recorder-like controls . Click Record to begin recording your sound. Be ready to click Stop promptly when you finish, so that you don’t record a block of dead air at the end of your sound. To save what you recorded, click Save and assign the sound a name. It now appears in your list of available alert sounds.
Remove a sound
After you select the name of a sound you want to remove, you can get rid of it in three ways:
* Click the Remove button. A dialog box appears, asking whether you’re sure that you want to remove the sound. If you click Yes, the sound is deleted from your System file. (You never can remove the Simple Beep.)
* Choose Cut from the Edit menu, or type the keyboard equivalent: Command-X. If you use this method, you don’t get the warning dialog box. (After you cut the sound, you can paste it into your Scrapbook for long-term storage.)
* The easiest way is to press the Clear key in the numeric keypad.
You can add as many sounds as you want to your system file, but watch out: digitized sounds take up lots of disk space. A seven-second sound file can be 150K or more. Adding too many sounds can bloat your System file quickly.
Sound control panel Secrets
How to rename a sound
You may think that there’s no way to rename a sound after you record it. Not so — here’s how.
In the Sound control panel, select the sound that you want to rename. Remove it from the list, using the Cut command (Edit menu). Next, use the Paste command (or press Command-V) to paste the sound back into your list. When you do so, you are asked to give the sound a name . Type a new name, and click OK.
Distributing or backing up your sounds
Any sound that you create with the Sound control panel becomes a draggable, trashable, movable icon, but it’s somewhat buried. To see it, open your System Folder; then double-click your System file. You’ll see all your sounds listed in the window. Manipulate them as you would any other icons.
Startup Sound Memos
If your Mac has a microphone, you can use the Sound control panel to leave audio messages for yourself or the next person who uses your Mac.
Record a message, using the Sound control panel. Double-click your System Folder; double-click your System file. Then drag the sound file that contains your message out of the System file and into the Startup Items folder (also in the System Folder). Your message automatically plays back the next time the Mac is turned on.
Roll credits!
Do you have the new-style Sound control panel? Press Option as you make a selection from the pop-up menu. You’re treated to an utterance by a very drugged-out programmer — or somebody acting like one — and a quote from Jung.
Why it’s called Sosumi
Ever wonder about the names of the sounds that come with System 7? For the most part, they’re onomatopoetic, spelled like they sound: “Wild Eep,” “Quack,” and so on. But what about that staccato E-flat diminished triad called “Sosumi”?
Early in Apple’s career as a computer-making superstar, there was a little legal trouble. (Apple’s always in legal trouble somewhere in the world.) And that trouble was with, believe it or not, the Beatles. The Beatles’ private record label was called Apple Records. The Beatles’ lawyers claimed that Apple, in making a computer with sound capabilities, was trying to get into the recording industry, causing confusion in consumers’ minds. After all, these two companies had the same names and were doing the same things, right?
So Apple sighed and promised Apple Records, in writing, that it would never get into the recording industry. Apple Records backed off, and Macintosh went forth into the world.
A couple of years ago, however, Apple started including a microphone with most Mac models. And guess what you’re supposed to do with that mike? Yup — make recordings! It certainly would take a hypersensitive record company to interpret giving away a free microphone as “entering the recording industry.” But you never know. Some wily Apple engineer, recognizing the potential litigation, gave the alert sound a name that serves as a subtle tribute to Apple Records: Sosumi!
Speech
This thoroughly enjoyable control panel lets your Mac read out loud. It’s the command center for the Mac’s text-to-speech feature, in which the Mac speaks whatever you’ve typed into SimpleText (or other compatible programs). See Chapter 23 for the full Speech scoop.
Meanwhile, this control panel lets you choose a default voice and rate of speaking. Best of all, if you click the speaker icon, you hear each voice tested, saying something hilariously in character. For example, the “Good News” voice sings, to the tune of the Graduation March, “Congratulations! You’ve just won the sweepstakes, and you don’t have to pay income tax again.” Zarvox says, in its alien monotone, “That looks like a peaceful planet…” And Deranged says, voice shaking, “I-I need to go on a really long va -a-cation...”
Sometimes we think it must be really fun to work at Apple.
Speech Setup
You only need this control panel if you have an AV Mac or a Power Mac and you want to talk to it — or, rather, talk to it and have it respond. We’re referring, of course, to Apple’s PlainTalk speech recognition feature, discussed in detail (along with this control panel) in Chapter 23.
Oh, yeah — there’s a hidden credit in here. Turn on Balloon Help, and point to the version number. Wowww.
Startup Disk
Startup Disk tells your Mac which disk it should start up from. Throw it away unless you have more than one disk attached to your Mac. Weirdly enough, even disks that have no System Folders appear in the control panel. Click the one that you want to be the startup disk the next time you turn on or restart the computer .
If you have more than one hard drive, or if you have a hard drive and a cartridge system (Zip or SyQuest, for example), it’s sometimes handy to have two system versions available — one System Folder on each drive. You use this control panel, in this case, to specify which System you want to be in control the next time the Mac starts. (Unfortunately, Startup Disk can’t distinguish among different partitions of a disk — only different disks.)
If you open this control panel and click in the blank white area around your disk icons, so that no icon is highlighted, the Mac will start up using the disk with the highest SCSI address number (see Chapter 30).
If you have only one hard drive, you can safely pull this one out of your System Folder.
Text
This special control panel, introduced in System 7.5, works in conjunction with WorldScript foreign-language systems. It allows you to specify (if you’ve purchased any foreign-language kits) which kind of writing system (Roman, Kanji, and so on) to use, and in which direction text should proceed across the page. We guess that this is a good one to throw away.
Trackpad
This control panel is, of course, useful only on PowerBooks — such as the 500, 5000, or 2000 series — on which you control the cursor by touching a trackpad. The Trackpad panel’s controls are exactly the same as those in the Mouse control panel (see the “Mouse” section earlier in this chapter).
So why keep Trackpad and Mouse? Because you may want to use your PowerBook at home with a real mouse plugged into it, and yet use the trackpad when you’re on the plane. By giving you two separate control panels, Apple makes it easy to set up separate degrees of responsiveness for each device. (This isn’t true of the 100-series PowerBooks, in which the Mouse control panel controls both trackball and mouse sensitivity.)
Users & Groups
You use the Users & Groups control panel to determine which network users (or groups of users) have access to the shared items on your Mac and the degree of access each user is granted. Look for full details in Chapter 32.
Views
The Views control panel can change the font for all text in Finder windows. It also allows you to specify the information included in list views.
In the Icon Views portion of the control panel, you can specify how you want icons to be displayed: along a straight or a staggered invisible grid. Select the “Always snap to grid” checkbox if you want icons to snap in line with an invisible grid when you drag them in Finder windows. (As mentioned in Chapter 1, you can always override the setting you make here — press the Command key as you drag the icon.)
 
You choose the font from the pop-up menu near the top of the control panel. Smaller fonts work best, especially if you have many files and folders crammed into Finder windows. But you can choose any size up to 36 points . Sizes larger than 24 points aren’t listed in the pop-up menu, but you can type larger point sizes directly in the size box, which is selected for editing as soon as you open the control panel. (Hint: select a font that’s built into the Mac, such as Geneva, Chicago, or Monaco; TrueType and ATM-ready fonts take the Mac longer to display.)
For list views, you also can specify the size of the icons that are displayed next to each file’s name. The largest of these views produces icons as big as the full-size icons.
The checkboxes in the bottom portion of the control panel allow you to select the information you want to see in list views. List views look much better if you eliminate categories that you don’t use. If you don’t use Labels on your files, for example, deselect the “Show labels” checkbox. If the version number of each file is not important to you, get rid of that, too. If you deselect all the options, your list views shows only the names of files and folders .
There are two other list-view options to consider. Check “Calculate folder sizes” if you want list views to include the size (in kilobytes) of folders as well as files. (If this option isn’t selected, you simply see a dash for each folder’s size in a Finder window.) Do so only temporarily, however; when “Calculate folder sizes” is on, your Mac becomes sporadically sluggish as it attempts to add up the sizes of all your files in the background.
Check “Show disk info in header” if you want the amounts of available and used disk space to be displayed at the top of each Finder window. Both options provide useful information in your list-view windows.
Techie note: Views, by the way, is the only control panel you can control using AppleScript.
The sedated hard disk window syndrome
Q: I’ve got a bizarre problem. When I double-click my hard disk icon — wow, it takes forever to open into a window...like two whole minutes. What’s going on?
A: You’ve fallen victim to a unique circumstance: you’re viewing your hard drive’s contents in size order (you chose, from the View menu in the Finder, “by Size”); and you turned on “Calculate folder sizes” in the Views control panel.
You see, to display your hard disk contents in a list sorted by size, largest first, the Mac has to calculate the sizes of all the folders in it before it can open the window. That’s what causes the delay.
If you were to turn “Calculate folder sizes” off, you wouldn’t experience the delay, but all the folders would appear clumped at the bottom of your hard disk window, not sorted by size.
Likewise, if you choose any other sorting method from the View menu — by Name, for example — you wouldn’t experience such a slowdown.
WindowShade
WindowShade is yet another shareware-program-made-good: Apple appropriated it for inclusion with System 7.5. It’s a neat one, too, excellent for PowerBooks and other small-screen Macs. WindowShade allows you to collapse any open window into nothing but a title bar.
To take this anticlutter step, you double-click the title bar of the window. With a neat little whoosh, the main portion of the window disappears, leaving only the title bar floating on the screen. (Note, however, that both the whooshing and the collapsing features default to being off when you first install your system software. You must open the WindowShade control panel and switch them on first.)
Unfortunately, some programs have their own ideas of what a title-bar double-click means (in Excel and Word, it means “expand this window to fill the monitor”). Therefore, WindowShade allows you to change the number of clicks required to collapse a window. You can even specify that you have to hold down a key (such as Option or Ctrl) while clicking for the collapsing to work.
In any case, you repeat the procedure to restore the window to its earlier size.
There’s only one Secret here — a very small one. To see the hidden credit, click the picture of the mouse button in the control-panel window.
