elium 1.0, Copyright ©1991 Robert L Mathews
        Icons designed by AndrewWynn (Cool, aren’t they?)

About Helium
You’ve probably said it yourself: “Balloon Help is a good thing!  But I hate the drudgery of having to go all the way to the Help Menu, turn on Balloon Help, point at the thing I want help with, and then turn Balloon Help off again every time I want help with one little thing!”  (If you haven’t said that, go ahead and say it now.  We’ll wait while you catch up.  Anyway, it sounds better when said out loud.)

Well, Helium is the perfect utility to put an end to that awful drudgery forever.  Helium allows you to hold down a key combination you select, and Help Balloons pop up - instantly (well, close enough).  When you let go of the keys, the Help Balloons disappear.  It’s almost magical!

Installing Helium
To install Helium, put it in the Control Panels folder (you can just drop it onto your closed System Folder and it will find its way there) and restart your Macintosh.  You should see the Helium icon (which was drawn by AndrewWynn, by the way) as it loads into memory.  If you want to turn Helium off for a single computing session, hold down the mouse button to prevent it from loading (you won’t see the Helium icon).  If you want to turn Helium off for longer than that, it’s probably more convenient to simply remove it from your Control Panels folder.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll want to open up the Helium control panel (you’ve already done that) and configure it for your machine.  There’s really only two useful things you can do here.

First of all, you can check or uncheck the "Show Startup Icon" checkbox - if it’s unchecked, you don’t get to see AndrewWynn’s great icon, but some people think startup icons mess up their startup screens, so you can do it if you want.

The second (and most important) thing to do is to set the combination of keys that will make Helium pop up the Help Balloons.  To do this, hold down the keys you want to use, and click the "Set Hot Keys" button with the mouse.  Pretty painless, eh?  You probably shouldn’t set it to be the same combination that any other application or extension uses to do something special - not because you’ll have any technical problems, but because you’d find two things happening at once.  You’ll find that you can only use the Command, Option, Shift and Control keys - any other keys you try to hold down are simply ignored.  Sorry.

A Note About Finder 7.0 Menus
Let me start by saying that I love Finder 7.0 dearly.  The folks at Apple did a fantastic job.  Now let me say that it seems to have some “unexpected features” (some people have overheard me calling them “bugs,” but I’m mostly past the resentment stage now).

These features can conceivably interfere with Helium’s ability to pop up menu Help Balloons in the Finder if you already have a menu pulled down, then press the hot keys.  If you have problems with this working, simply let go of the mouse button, hold down the hot keys, then click in the menu title again.  Helium will then work properly until the computer is restarted.  Lumped into the same “unexpected feature” category (although the causes are actually different) are the fact that you cannot get Balloon Help for a menu title until after you have clicked in a menu at least once since you turned the computer on (go figure; I don’t understand that one either), and the fact that Apple menu items will never show Help Balloons unless you have the hot keys pressed down when you first click in the Apple.

Anyway, now that we’re past all that unpleasantness, let me just end on a happy note by reiterating that if you have any problems with Finder menus showing Help Balloons, you can just hold down the Helium hot keys before you pull down the menu, and the problem will go away (and probably not come back until you restart).

Distribution Information
Helium is completely free!  You can give it to a friend, upload it to a bulletin board, press a CD-ROM with 13,915 copies of Helium on it, and you won’t owe me a cent.  If you were going to send me some money, buy yourself a pizza instead (I think you should get pineapple and green pepper, but then again, I’m a programmer).  It is, however, copyright ©1991 Robert L Mathews (Helium, not the pizza) and not public domain, and I reserve the right to restrict distribution in the future if, for some reason, I become anal retentive (say, for example, I got a job as the guy responsible for cancelling Twin Peaks). 

However, I’ll take this space to plug something else that I do sell…  It’s called Speed Beep, and it really neat-o.  If you’ve ever been annoyed by your Mac beeping a number of times in a row, or you have some long beep sounds installed, you’ve probably wished that you could keep working while your computer finishes beeping.  Well, with Speed Beep (which is a control panel like Helium, only much better) you can.  You can also have beeps chosen at random, and you can have more than one beep sound playing at once (if your Macintosh supports it - most newer models do).

You should be able to get Speed Beep from the same type of place that you got Helium from - then you can try it out for free before you buy it (aka “shareware”).  This is the best way.  If, however, you can’t find a copy of Speed Beep and you’re positive you’d like to buy it anyway, you can send me $9.95 for a disk containing Speed Beep (and lots of sounds, too).  Just make your check or money order payable to "Robert L Mathews" and send it to…

    obert L Mathews
    ox 204
    15 Oakland Avenue
    akland, CA 94611-4519

You can contact me on America Online by sending mail to "L Products" if you’d just like to talk about Helium (or Speed Beep, or really anything at all).  If enough people drop me a note telling me they like it, I might add some other features, like the ability to specify the font and size that Help Balloons show up in.

Aware-Ware?
If you’ve really read all the way to the bottom, congratulations.  You’re just the sort of get-out-and-go person that we want reading this section.  Since Helium deals with balloons, I’d like to mention something about real balloons.

Every year, thousands of animals die from choking on helium balloons that people have let go outside.  The bright colors are attractive to many animals, and the texture fools marine animals into thinking that they’re jellyfish when floating in the water.  The animal dies a painful and completely unnecessary death.

Don’t let helium balloons go outside, and don’t participate in contests to see how far balloons can travel.  An animal’s life is worth more than that.

For more information about animal rights issues, you can contact People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals:

    ETA
    .O. Box 42516
    ashington DC 20015

…or you can call them for information at (301) 770-7444.  Many of the suggestions PETA has are simple ones, like not letting helium balloons go outside — you won’t be required to become a vegetarian or anything radical.  A small change is better than none at all.

Another option for you modem types is the Amnet BBS at (303) 223-1297 (data).  It’s a great discussion forum for animal rights.  Try it, and “thank you for your support.”