MacLED is a little shareware program ( $5 - see Why You Should Register and Shareware Notice below) that lets you create short animated messages on your desktop that look like LED
signs. It's a great way to leave notes for yourself or others. As MacLED is a small application (only about 30k ), you can make several copies of it and run several different messages simultaneously on the same computer. MacLED runs very nicely in the background and is very hard to miss if you have an important note to remember. You may try MacLED free for two weeks. If you continue to use it, you must register. You are free, indeed, encouraged, to upload this program anywhere you please, as long as all original materials (ie, documentation) are included.
MacLED has been tested on an LC475, PowerMac 7100/80AV, Performa 450, Performa 636CD, IIsi, and II. It requires System 7. It also requires Color Quickdraw, which means it won't run on a
Mac Plus or Mac SE.
All comments, suggestions, bug reports, fan mailings, and especially registrations are welcome. Email is preferred for everything except the registrations. :)
Memory Usage
From the beginning. I wanted MacLED to be a "small" application, both in terms of
disk space used and RAM required. However, I didn't want to limit it to displaying
small windows of text.
As a result, MacLED uses the system heap , not the application heap to store graphics data.
This means that increasing the memory partition for MacLED will not improve performance.
It also means that MacLED will only use as much memory as it needs. Nice, eh?
Why You Should Register
You should register because it's the right (and legal) thing to do. OK, so that's not enough of a reason. :) Here are some others:
1) All upgrades are free to registered users.
2) Registering will encourage me to write upgrades with bug fixes and cool new features.
3) Registering will encourage me to write more nifty programs like this one.
4) It can be your Good Deed for the Dayｪ.
See? I knew I could convince you. Really, it only takes a minute or two. Just print off the registration form, fill it out, and mail it off. Easy. If that's too much of a hassle, you can always just send the money. :)
Official Shareware Notice
MacLED is shareware. You are granted a free 14 day license from the date of receipt. If you continue to use MacLED after this 14 day period, you must register it by sending me (Daniel Hutchings) $5. Completing the registration form is optional. You must purchase a separate copy of the software for each Macintosh it is used on. You need not purchase additional copies to run several copies of MacLED on the same computer. Under no circumstances may MacLED be used beyond the initial trial period unless it has been registered. All registered users are entitled to free upgrades to all future versions.
Permission is hereby granted for non-profit distribution of MacLED, on the condition that the software is not modified in any way, and the complete works of the software are included in the distribution. MacLED may not be distributed for profit in any form unless permission is granted in writing from Daniel Hutchings.
The author (Daniel Hutchings) is not responsible for any damage to the purchaser's computer system or data resulting from use of MacLED.
Known Problems
･ Speed controls may not work for very large windows.
This has to do with the speed of your computer. MacLED uses off screen bitmapping, which involves lots of fast data manipulation. If the windows get big enough, MacLED can't copy all of the data as fast as it would like to, and simply proceeds as quickly as it can.
･ The scrolling text looks great when MacLED is running in the foreground, but is sometimes chunky/slow/inconsistent when run in the background.
When a Mac application is running in the background (or the foreground, for that matter - but especially in the background) it is at the mercy of all the other programs running in terms of how much time it gets to spend working . If you are running processor intensive applications in the foreground, you are likely to get poor performance out of MacLED. Control Panels are also notorious for hogging CPU time.
Credits
Andrew Nolen
Chief Beta Tester and Conceptual Advisor
K. Scott Alberts, Kristofer Johnson, Daryl Yoder
Housemates, for putting up with me screaming at my computer. :)
Molly Davies, Barbara Grant, David Moore, Chloe Papke, Steve Postellon, Fritz Ruehr, Dan White
Miscellaneous Encouraging Folk. :)
Author
Daniel Hutchings
OCMR Box 1267
Oberlin, OH 44074
dhutchin@cs.oberlin.edu
Version History
(starting with 1.3)
1.41 Made some changes to the documentation.
1.4 Made the characters variable size for smoother text.
Also fixed a bug which would have enabled the user to make the main window disappear.
