Welcome to this special CD-ROM sampler! It’s designed to offer a tantalizing taste of the bestselling book/CD-ROM from IDG Books, Macworld Mac & Power Mac SECRETS, 3rd edition!
This 1100-page book, written by Macworld columnists David Pogue and Joseph Schorr, was named “the best Mac book of the year” by the Boston Computer Society. The Washington Post called the book “the newly definitive Macintosh reference work, replacing the venerable Macintosh Bible.”And the Mac Professionals Book Club called it “a gold mine of undocumented secrets.”
You won’t believe how much is new in this edition! Everything new and worth explaining: PCI Power Macs … an illustrated Copland preview … Zip and Jaz disks … the Web … OpenDoc … QuickDraw 3-D … OpenTransport … PC Platform hybrid Mac/PCs ... it’s all here, explained with clarity, wisdom, and humor.
And Mac SECRETS remains the only published source that covers:
• every system-software version from 1.0 through 7.5.3, including the Performa “P” versions
• every Mac model, from the 128K through the PCI Power Macs
• every control panel, extension, patch, desk accessory, and weird little icon in your System folder
• every undocumented Option-key trick, secret About box, and time-saving shortcuts in popular software
Mac SECRETS also comes with over 45 megabytes of commercial software and hand-picked software on CD-ROM (or floppies), including
• the complete Now Utilities 5.0.2 —
not a demo, but the actual, shipping, $130 program!
• the real, shipping DiskFit Direct —
the easiest backup program alive!
• Microfrontier’s Color It! 2.3 —
commercial Photoshop killer that runs in half the RAM...
and much more!
To get your hands on Macworld Mac & Power Mac SECRETS, 3rd Edition, visit a bookstore — or call IDG Books at 800-762-2974.
 
Here’s what’s on this CD-ROM:
‚àë 25 PROGRAMS... some of the best shareware from the real Mac SECRETS CD-ROM!
Mac SECRETS also comes with over $300 worth of commercial software—but you have to buy the book to get that! (To find out about the programs that come with the book, open the SECRETS Software Sampler folder.)
∑ EXCLUSIVE: Label SECRETS Pro — turns your Labels menu into a Secret-A-Day calendar!
∑ The Mac SECRETS Guide to System Folder Clutter —what you can trash right now — what each item is — and secret features of every control panel and extension. A 65-page excerpt from the actual book.
 
These are the 26 programs we’ve included on this CD-ROM. To read about the other 65 that come with the actual Macworld Mac & Power Mac SECRETS book, see “The Real SECRETS CD-ROM…” on this CD. (It’s in the About “Mac SECRETS” folder.)
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.”
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.
Clockometer
How fast is your Mac, anyway? This handy utility from Newer, Inc., tells you at a glance — in MHz.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 of Macworld Mac & Power Mac SECRETS.
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.
