There would be few Australian school children who have not seen the First Fleet database in one form or another. Until now, all of its incarnations have suffered from a number of drawbacks: they needed a hard disk to run; their user interfaces were complicated; they were open to unauthorised modification by students; or they simply didn’t run on a Macintosh.
This program attempts to solve all of these problems. It should be usable on any Macintosh with 512k or more of memory (please note that it has only been tested on Macintosh Plus upwards), one floppy drive, and System 4.2 or later. It is also Multi-Finder and System 7 friendly, and can be run from a server too.
FIRST FLEET for MACINTOSH displays the first fleet convicts’ records in a list in a window. The usual dragging, resizing, zooming and scrolling operations work as you would expect in a Macintosh program.
In the bottom left of the window is a panel showing how many records are currently displayed from the 777 convicts available. When you start the program, none of the records are displayed. Choose “Show All” from the “List” menu, and after a brief pause, all 777 records will be available for inspection. Choose “Hide All” to put them away again.
Use the “Find…” and “Find More…” commands from the “List” menu to selectively display convict records. The “Find…” command discards all the currently displayed records (as for “Hide All”) and then displays a new list which matches the criteria that you specify in the dialog. The “Find More…” command leaves the list in place and may be used to add more records to it.
For example, you would use two commands, “Find…” and then “Find More…,” to display all those convicts whose last name was “Smith” OR “Brown.” The records are always displayed in ascending order by the convicts’ names, and a given record is never displayed more than once.
The search dialog can be used to hide or show records. Use the attribute and relation popups and the value field, to construct criteria for the records that you want to hide or show. Use the “Add,” “Delete” and “Change” buttons to add them to the list of criteria, or edit it. All the criteria in the list must match a record for it to be shown or hidden.
We are currently developing support materials for the program, including a manual and teaching resources. The program itself has already been in regular use by students from grades 8 to 10 since the beginning of 1992 and has been well received. Future plans for enhancing the program include the ability to sort the list, and compute aggregate values. These additions will only be made available to users who have paid the shareware registration fee.
NOTE: WHILE THIS SOFTWARE HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY TESTED AND IS AS RELIABLE AS WE CAN MAKE IT, NO LIABILITY IS ACCEPTED FOR ITS USE OR ANY DAMAGES RESULTING THEREFROM.
Please send payments ($50 in Australian funds) to:
Andrew Smith
68 Granville Street
Launceston TAS 7250
AUSTRALIA
All comments and suggestions are welcome, whether or not you wish to become a registered user. You may also send e-mail to me at the following internet address:
C15628@tanus.oz.au
Have fun using FIRST FLEET for MACINTOSH. We look forward to hearing from you.
