Birthdays and Such is an application meant to be launched on daily startup, to remind you of the important birthdays and anniversaries in your life.
The steps to use Birthdays and Such are simple (the details are below):
• Install Birthdays and Such by copying the Birthdays and Such folder to your hard disk.
• Set Birthdays and Such to run every time you start your Macintosh.
• Transform the sample “Reminders” file (don’t change the file name) by typing in your own list of important dates.
Then every time you turn on your Macintosh, it will start up Birthdays and Such. The program will look up the current date, scan the Reminders file for upcoming events, and display just those you need to do something about.
If you leave your Macintosh running for days at a time, that’s ok, too. Just leave Birthdays and Such running: its window will update to the next day’s reminders every night on the stroke of midnight. (I specifically designed Birthdays and Such both to launch super quickly and to run all the time: it’s absolutely the smallest executable I could make it. In fact, it’s probably the smallest program on your machine!)
And one more step. After you try it for a day, a week, or a month, you need to decide what Birthdays and Such is worth and send a check or a money order for that amount to: Ron Lichty, P.O. Box 27262, San Francisco, CA 94127.
Installing Birthdays and Such
To install Birthdays and Such from a floppy disk (or CDROM) onto your hard drive (you can skip these steps if you downloaded and uncompressed Birthdays and Such from a network source):
1) Turn on your Macintosh.
2) Insert the floppy disk labeled Birthdays and Such in the floppy disk drive of your Macintosh.
3) Copy the folder labeled Birthdays and Such folder to your hard disk.
4) Eject the Birthdays and Such disk.
Setting Birthdays and Such to run every time you start your Macintosh
1) Open the Birthdays and Such folder on your hard disk (the one you just moved there).
2) Select the icon labeled Birthdays and Such… (click once on the icon).
3) Choose the Make Alias command from the File menu.
(Note: this step requires Macintosh System 7; for a System 6 Mac, install Birthdays and Such using the instructions in Chapter Two of the Birthdays and Such manual.)
4) Drag the new file labeled Birthdays and Such… alias into the Startup Items folder, which is located inside the System Folder.
Installation is now complete. Now every time you turn on your Macintosh, Birthdays and Such will start up, look through the Reminders file, and remind you of the upcoming events in your life.
To try out Birthdays and Such, double-click Birthdays and Such… The four changes of season are in the sample Reminders file so you can get a flavor of Birthdays and Such right away. (If you have any troubles, see Chapter 5 in the manual for help.)
Setting Up Your Reminders
The file you create of all your important dates, a text file which must be named “Reminders”, is the source of information for Birthdays and Such. The Reminders file must always be located in the same folder as Birthdays and Such.
Double-click the sample Reminders file. SimpleText (a simple word processor supplied by Apple that was once called TeachText) will be launched to display the sample reminders and let you enter and edit your reminders. (If you want to use any other word processor, see Chapter 3 of the manual.)
You’ll see that each Reminder consists of four lines, always in the same order:
date date of reminder (in non-English-speaking countries, see Chapter 3 of the manual)
warning-period number of days prior to date to begin reminding you (up to 99)
Reminder the line you want to display as a reminder
- separator (a dash as the first character on the line)
No blank lines are permitted.
Here’s an example Reminders file with three reminders:
January 14
2
David’s birthday (1955).
-
Jan 23
0
Grandma’s birthday .
-
7/19
10
Author Ron Lichty’s birthday, P.O. Box 27262, SF, CA 94127.
-
So in the example, you would be reminded of David’s birthday from January 12-14, Grandma’s birthday only on January 23rd itself, and Ron’s birthday from July 9-19, long enough to buy him lots of presents.
The Manual
Remember, there’s a whole manual full of details (sometimes fun, usually helpful), if you want them.
