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1995-12-11
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191 lines
Coffee Break
Copyright 1994-95, by Thomas Reed
What it is
Coffee Break is a simple application that is designed to force you to take
periodic breaks, so that you can reduce your chances of getting a Repetitive
Stress Injury. You may set an amount of "work time", during which Coffee
Break sits in the background with a timer displayed, and an amount of "break
time", or "sleep time", during which you are forced to take a break from the
computer. For more information about how to use Coffee Break, see the
on-line help. (From within Coffee Break, choose Help from the File menu,
Coffee Break Help from the Balloon Help menu, press the Help key (on an
Extended keyboard), or press Cmd-? to access the on-line help.)
Legalities
This documentation must be included with all copies of Coffee Break. Do not
give out copies of this program without the documentation. This program is
available for all non-commercial use, so please feel free to pass it along
to your friends. It may not be sold for profit without the author's written
permission.
Shareware notice
This program is Shareware, and if you decide to keep it, you should send in
a registration fee of $5, along with a brief note, which should include your
e-mail address (if you have one). If you like it, please do! You'll help me
put my wife through medical school! :-) You'll also ensure that I continue
to write more programs, and continue to improve Coffee Break. To register,
send a check or cash (in U.S. dollars) to the snail mail address at the end
of this file. Thanks, and I hope you like it!
However, the real purpose behind this program is to help all you hackers and
other serious typists out there keep in good health! ;-) So, if it comes
down to it and you for some reason can't register it, use it anyway. Health
is the prime concern here, not making money! I'm trusting you to register it
if you can.
System requirements
Coffee Break requires System 7.x. It uses strictly System 7 routines for
it's background/foreground switches and other things. So, there's no need to
even TRY it on a machine running Sys 6. It should run on ANY machine capable
of running System 7, however.
The Floating Timer option requires System 7.1 or later. If you have System
7.0.x, you will not be able to use this option.
Some of the special features depend on certain screen saver options.
Different screen savers support some, all, or none of these options. Listed
below is a table of which screen savers I've tested with the program and
what options (from the Set Options dialog) they support. For a complete
description of these options, see the on-line help.
Saver Pause when saver on Built-in saver only
AfterDark 2.0x yes yes
AfterDark (pre-2.0x) yes no
Basic Black 1.3.1 yes yes
ScreenDaemon yes yes
Sleeper yes yes
Darkside of the Mac 4.1 yes no*
Darkside of the Mac 4.2 yes yes
* note that while Darkside does not support the "Built-in saver" option, it
does let you turn this option on. However, if you do, you still won't get
any of the benefits of this option.
As you can tell, many screen savers DON'T support these options. I've tried
nearly every screen saver I could find, and these are the only ones that are
friendly enough to tell other programs of their existance. However, I've
found that the ones listed above are the most widely-used screen savers.
Also, note that if you have Darkside, you should change the name of either
Darkside or Coffee Break so that Coffee Break loads AFTER Darkside. If
Coffee Break loads first, the screen saver options will turn themselves off,
as they won't detect that a screen saver is installed. I'll undoubtedly try
to compensate for this in future releases.
Introduction
This program was inspired in me several years ago (1993), when I became
concerned about Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSI). Since I work with
computers both at work and at home, I'm setting myself up for RSI. I didn't
want that to happen, but wasn't sure what to do about it.
I heard of a shareware program that would force you to take breaks at
certain intervals, but I thought that that was a kind of stupid idea.
Obviously, I've discovered the usefulness of such a program by now!
Unfortunately, when I actually got a copy of that program, it fell short of
my expectations. So, I wrote my own, and fixed all of the problems I had
with it.
A debated option
One of the options in this program, the Restrict user option, was the source
of much debate between my beta testers and myself. Some felt, as I did, that
the program should be heavy-handed -- to protect against our weak willpower.
However, others felt that not allowing you to quit or exit a break was going
a bit too far. In an attempt to satisfy both parties, this option was added.
It is slightly difficult to turn off, since being able to easily do so would
remove any usefulness to the former group. However, turning this option off
gives the latter group the ability to quit quickly and to exit sleep mode.
As a service to registered users who feel that this feature is too much of a
temptation, I will provide a version of the program with this feature
disabled. If you are a registered user and would like a copy of the disabled
program, you may either send me an e-mail message requesting the program, or
send a self-addressed, stamped disk mailer, a blank disk, and a letter
requesting the program.
Known problems
This program doesn't work well when you're playing certain games. Many games
must disallow other programs from getting processor time in order to have
good performance in their animations and sound effects. For such games,
Coffee Break will not be able to force you to take a break until the game
allows other programs to get some processor time. (This can often be during
a pause or in between games.) There is nothing that I can do about this, and
nothing that game authors can do unless they want to adversely affect game
performance.
In addition, one game (Arashi) uses the same method to tell a program it's
covering the screen as the Coffee Break-compatible screensavers listed
above. In such a case, Coffee Break's timer will remain paused as long as
you're playing. This is obviously a problem, but there's not much I can do
to fix this.
Credits
First of all, I'd like to thank Pete Gontier for his help in installing the
AfterDark Gestalts. Although I still haven't gotten them to work correctly
yet (partly due to the onset of the complications of PPC code), he helped me
immeasurably with understanding the underlying process.
Thanks to Keith Rollin for helping me with a few other bugs, and for his
invaluable suggestions.
Thanks to John Norstad for allowing me to use snippets of his source code
from NewsWatcher.
Thanks to Matt Slot for writing appe Windows, which helped immeasurably with
getting Coffee Break's floating window to work.
Thanks to Craig O'Donnell for allowing me to use a sound from his Cool Mac
Sounds book.
I'd also like to thank all my initial beta-testers. They not only helped me
iron out many of the intermittent bugs, but they also gave me many
invaluable suggestions, without which this program would not be what it is
today. Thanks to Derek A. Borgford, Flint S. Hahn, Al Heynneman, Devon
Hubbard, Chris Hwang, Ken Linger, Kathy Peck, Eric Thompson, Sean Vadras,
and Harvey Wong. You guys were a HUGE help!
I'd like to thank the numerous people on the Internet who have, at some time
or another, answered questions for me about technical problems. I'd also
like to thank the people who convinced me this idea wasn't stupid. (Yes, at
one point, I thought the idea of a program like this was stupid. I obviously
think differently now.)
Thanks to Metrowerks for writing CodeWarrior. Thanks to Hypercard clip art
for providing the basis of some of the art in the screensaver portion of the
program. Thanks to whoever at Apple wrote ResEdit. (And good luck on getting
a newer version out! nudge, nudge...) Thanks to Apple for making the
Macintosh, without which none of this would be here.
And, most of all, thanks to all my registered users, without whom I might
have stopped all this at version 1.0!
How to contact me
If you want to send me a message through e-mail, you can contact me at
ThomasReed@aol.com
For registration purposes, or if you don't have access to e-mail, here's my
snail mail address:
Thomas Reed
1912 McCausland
St. Louis, MO 63117
WHEN YOU REGISTER, PLEASE SEND A BRIEF NOTE TO TELL ME WHAT YOUR E-MAIL
ADDRESS IS, IF YOU HAVE ONE.
Hope you like Coffee Break!
Also look for my games! Try Valley of Peril, if you're into adventure games!
It's freeware, so there's no charge! Also try The Solitaire of Champions if
you like solitaire games.