Special thanks to John Armstrong who wrote to me with the initial idea for Sloop. He had been searching for quite some time for a cursor focusing program for the Mac. He then wrote to me asking if I, as a Mac shareware author, might be able to make something like that.
I was fascinated by the idea, dived into documentation, and stayed up all that night programming. By morning, ten hours later, I had a working, albeit sketchy, first implementation. This first version had no user interface and no preferences but, for the most part, it worked.
After this, John helped me considerably as I cleaned up the code, added preferences, and debugged the initial development and alpha versions. He offered many suggestions along the way and tested out every major change to the code.
So without him, this project never would have come to completion.
Thanks very much to Mamiya Natsuki who donated his time to design Sloop's icons.
Thanks to the following beta testers and other people who have helped me to improve Sloop: Wayne Babineau, Bill Bandes, Denis Chagnon, Karl Cook, DDunkerley, Michel Eytan, Jon Gotow, Gernot J. Gutjahr, Larry Haff, Simon Hakiel, Chikara Hashimoto, Roma Hinton, Peter Hoerster, Jim Isaac, Akitoshi Kimura, Chris Li, Michael Lilliquist, Ray Lindsey, Jac Lundqvist, Tony Meyer, Bill Moore, Kazuhisa Nakagawa, Roger M. Poor, Andy Rogers, Fuminori Takeda, Ed Thome, Koichi Tsubo.
Thanks to the following for making suggestions on or reporting bugs in Sloop 1.0: Pepi Acebo, Merijn Broeren, Kiwhan Chung, Matt Clark, Jimmy Collins, David-Artur Daix, John Dannecker, Bob Dixon, Philip C. Dixon, Alex Feinman, Terry Harpold, William Lane, Jan Leppink, Yongsheng Liu, Bob McDaniels, Jared Mellin, Rocky Mullin, Takashi Nishigaya, Oso, Parker J. Palmer, Don Parker, Nicholas Riley, Randy Robb, Dave Roode, David Salomon, Francis Schwebig, Ken Slocum, Allen Smith, Jim Stelljes, Karl Warschau.
A lot of people have had input on Sloop ranging from a single email or two to extended testing. If I kept thanking everyone who sent in suggestions or bug reports, SloopΓÇÖs memory footprint would grow too large. But I want those who do send in reports or suggestions to know that your input is much appreciated. Thanks!
Special thanks to all those people who have paid for programs I have written and those who will pay for my programs in the future. Your material support has made it possible for me to write new programs like Sloop.
Thanks to Metrowerks for making CodeWarrior, a fantastic development environment for the Mac, and, of course, to Apple Computer, for making the Mac itself and the MacOS which allows enough flexibility to be able to do things like Sloop. (If you're a Mac fanatic like I am, you might want to check out <http://www.evangelist.macaddict.com/> for information about joining Guy Kawasaki's excellent EvangeList mailing list.) Also thanks to Jon Zobkiw for his book "A Fragment of Your Imagination" and Dave Mark for originally teaching me how to program the Mac Toolbox with his numerous books and articles.
Thanks also to my cat, Willy Bob, who likes to sit next to my computer and bat at the cursor with his paw as it moves around the screen, inspiring me to do more things with the cursor.
Of course, any problems with this program are due to my own coding and shouldn't be blamed on any of these folks. Except perhaps on Willy Bob whose voluminous shedding of cat hairs clogged up my mouse and may have resulted in an inaccurate perception of cursor movement.
