This program is intended for young children and allows them to drag face parts and accessories around to create their own 'potatoe person'. It is fairly simple to use and children seem to have little problem 'picking up' the required skills. In addition to being able to create your own potatoe person, the program will speak the name of each part you click on. You may however turn the sound off if this becomes tiresome. As well, you can save your 'tuberling' to disk, retrieve previously saved tuberlings, modify them, and re-save them. The program does not currently support printing of tuberlings. You may of course use command-shift-3 (or 4) to dump the contents of the screen to either your printer or as a MacPaint file.
To place a part on your potatoe person, use the cursor to click on a face part or accessory and drag it over to the potatoe. When you let up on the mouse button, the part is released. You may always rearrange features you have already placed by simply clicking on the part and sliding it around. To get rid of any piece, drag it over to the right half of the screen - it will disappear when you release the mouse button.
There is a limit of 255 parts on each tuberling. It is unlikely that a child will ever reach this limit. If someone should, the program doesn't crash, but will merely ignore additional parts dragged over.
In an effort to simplify the program, I ignored a few Macintosh standards - specifically in regard to file handling. 'Get Tuberling' is the same as the 'Open' you more often find in programs that read and write files. Also, 'Save Tuberling' is really a 'Save As'. There is no close.
I wrote this because I was a little disappointed with the number and quality of childrens programs on the Macintosh. There are certainly some nice ones, but far too few. So, for what it's worth, here's another children's program. The idea stemmed from a little thing I did around when I got my first Mac. I drew a real complex potatoe-head and all these facial features with MacPaint. I showed some friends how you could 'lasso' the face parts and make your own potatoe head person. Well, it went over pretty well but, after making a rather 'busy' potatoe person, one of my friends quit MacPaint and did the old, "Yes" to the "Save changes before closing?". So, there went my potatoe person kit. Now that I have picked up on programming the Mac, I decided to revisit that little MacPaint file with a program that allows you to create, save, and retrieve potatoe people. I had my girlfriend do the voice to make the prgram even more educational.
A note about the logo: If you're familiar with the Soft Dorothy Software logo, you may have wondered about the departure from this logo for this program. Well, yes, the logo will return on all my 'other' programs, but for purposes of this very-young-children program, I have chosen an alternative logo straight from the pages of 'Ozma of Oz' - a book from the 'Wizard of Oz' series by L. Frank Baum. The illustration was done by John R. Neill and is from the original publication of the book.
This program is shareware. If you or your child enjoy it I ask for $8 or whatever you find reasonable. Your support will encourage upgrades to this program as well as future new programs. And, your support is appreciated. Thank you - enjoy.
