Volume Number:		9
Issue Number:		1
Column Tag:		Tips & Tidbits

Tips & Tidbits

By Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief

This column is your opportunity to spread the word about little bits of information that you find out about. These tidbits can be programming related or they can be user tips that are particularly useful to programmers.

MacTutor will pay $25 for every tip used, and $50 for the Tip of the Month. You can also take your award in orders or subscriptions.

To submit a tip, send in a letter to the magazine. AppleLink is our preferred method, but feel free to send something via any e-mail address or US Mail. If you do send snail mail, enclose a printed copy and a disk copy of the letter so that it does not have to be retyped.

Let us know what you think. Remember, this is your magazine. Try ‘em out and let us know...

Tip of the month

Have you ever wanted to invoke debugger from your C code, but only under certain circumstances? This tip is a great way to invoke the debugger programmatically. In THINK C, define the following macro:

#define oDebugger() do { asm { BTST#2,Keymap+7  } asm { BEQ@NoDebug } 
asm { _Debugger } asm {@NoDebug } }while (0)

Then, any calls to

oDebugger();

in your source code will fall into the debugger only if the option key is held down.

Obviously, be sure to take this out before the final version. I do a #ifdef conditional around the macro just to be sure it doesn't compile into any of my final versions. I have tried this only with THINK C 5.0, so (as they say) your mileage may vary.

- Kent Miller

Arlington, Texas

Faster access to the MacTutor CD-ROM Index

CD-ROMs are great for distributing large amounts of data, but they are not the fastest things known to man. The All of MacTutor CDs use On Location™ from On Technology to index the contents of the CD. Although On Location is comparitively very fast, you can increase it’s speed dramatically by copying the index to your hard disk and accessing it from there. This methodolgy could speed up your index access by as much as 15 times.

- Neil Ticktin

Editor-in-Chief

Auto Hides in System 7

If you use the “Hide” feature in System 7 application switching, there is an automatic way. Hold down the option key while switching applications, System 7 will automatically hide the application you are switching from.

This works whether you use the application menu or by just clicking on another application’s window.