Welcome to release 4.1 of the Bicycle Gear Calculator. If you’ve never seen it before, this is for designing gearing schemes – it allows you to see the effective ratios of front and back clusters.
4.1 is an evolutionary upgrade to 4.0. Its main enhancements include the ability to handle 8 gears at the back, and some wider ranges on the scale. There is also a nice front page that you get when you first go in – this has a few random colour pictures that I found on the net. The interface has been modified to be more menu based, and there is an import feature that will read your calculation cards from another stack – so you can upgrade.
Set against this, the stack now requires the Colorizing HC XCMD stack for use – even if you don’t have a colour monitor. This contains extra resources, including the menus used on the stack. See below regarding installation.
The colour pictures are held in Quicktime format in stack “BGC Colour Aids”. If you don’t get pictures right in the top left-hand corner, there will be something wrong: the main BGC stack is silent if it cannot find the Aids stack, or if Quicktime is not installed, and just uses some course pictures in its own area. You can safely delete the Aids stack if you don’t like the effect. On the other hand, if you have some nice appropriate photos, for which there are not copyright problems, perhaps you could send them to me – these ones came of the net in gif format, and are not of the highest quality. I added some JFIF format pictures at one point, but have removed them pending checking of the copyright. Typically each picture takes aboutt 35K, so you won’t want too many in there.
To add pictures to the stack, copy the PICT resource into the Aids stack using ResEdit. Then follow the instructions in the appropriate page of the stack: one page gives the list of pictures than will be used when Quicktime is found, the other when it is not.
Installation
The basic BCG can be placed anywhere you like, and you can have several copies if you find that appropriate. If you have a previous version of this stack, then you can use the new import feature to move your old data to the new stack.
BGC now requires the Colorizing HC XCMD stack, v1.1.5 of which is included. If you do not already have this, place this stack where you usually put XCMD support stacks – by default, place in the same folder as Hypercard and Home, but I prefer a subfolder called “Extras”. In the latter case, you may be acked to find the stack with a dialogue box – the first time only. In the last resort, for example if you wish to have several versions of the XCMD stack, you could place it in the same place folder as the BGC stack, but this is not generally recommended.
The BGC Colour Aids stack can be placed with the Colorizing HC XCMD stack, or with the BGC stack itself. You need not install this, and it will not be used on monochrome monitors.
The aids stack uses some resources in “Some of Rinaldi’s”. Place this in the same place as the Colorizing HC XCMD stack. Actually you only need this if you have: (1) installed the BGC Colour Aids stack; and (2) plan to add pictures to it. It is not used otherwise.
