This is a brief hands-on guide to using Guy Friday. Keep this window open on the bottom right corner of your screen as you follow along.
Information Nuggets
Guy Friday lets you organize information into nuggets. A typical nugget might contain a name and phone number. Or it might contain an item in your To Do list.
Let’s make a nugget now. On the top menu bar, pull down the Nuggets menu. Select New (or hit ⌘N). A small window will appear on your screen.
Type into it the following:
Patrick Henry
(patriot, Boston)
fax (617) 555-1002
(617) 555-1776
When you’re done typing, you’re ready to enter a second nugget. Either hit ⌘N or, for variety, click the on-screen button in the small gray Status Window (the button has a picture of a blank Info Nugget. It’s second from the left.)
A new Info Nugget appears, ready for your typing. But notice that Guy Friday automatically tidies-up the first info nugget by shrinking it to perfectly fit the text you have entered. At first, you may be disconcerted by this Auto re-size feature, but you’ll soon find it useful and efficient. (If you don’t, you can turn it off through Edit Preferences...)
Now type:
John Adams
(patriot, brewer)
123 Cambridge Street
Boston, MA 01627
(617) 555-1781
Notice that you can type this information in whatever order you like. Also notice that you don't have to label the phone number by typing “Phone” or something similar. When it comes time to have Guy Friday dial a phone number for you, he'll be smart enough to figure out what a phone number looks like.
Now let's add one more nugget. Again, type ‚åòN.
Type the following:
Il Bastante
(restaurant, Italian)
606 Amsterdam Ave.
New York, NY 10024
Boss: Jimmy
You can have as many nuggets of information floating around in your system as you like. For example, I might have another nugget with the name of another restaurant, or a nugget with my Compuserve account # and password (which I won’t picture here, for obvious reasons). I currently have about 100 or so Info Nuggets that I refer to fairly often in my life.
Searching for information
Now you’re ready to see how Guy Friday works. First, clear your screen of those annoying Info Nuggets (remember, information is annoying until you actually need it). Do this by pulling down the Selection menu and choosing the last item, Clear screen. (You’ll quickly learn the keyboard shortcut, which is ⌘U.)
Now, pretend you’re working in another program, like Photoshop, or MacWrite. For now, just pop yourself into the Finder by clicking your mouse on a blank area in your desktop. Go ahead.
Now pretend you’re working on your computer, but all of a sudden you need to call that guy—you know, that guy whose name you can’t remember. You know the one I’m talking about. You saw him riding his horse through Boston, shouting some madness about how red coats were coming, and you thought he was insane—not to mention that he had a terrible fashion sense.
But now you need to call him on the phone. Why? Don’t ask. This is shareware, after all. You can’t expect believable character motivation in the on-line docs. For that, go pay five hundred dollars to Microsoft.
So here’s what you do.
Click the Guy Friday Status Window, the little gray window that always floats on top of your Guy Friday screen. I like to keep it in the bottom right corner of my screen, regardless of what application I’m working on. Guy Friday will be called to the front.
Now pull down the Selection menu and choose Get references to... Again, it won't take you long to memorize that it’s keyboard equivalent is ⌘G.
So how do you get someone’s phone number if you don’t know his name? Well, let’s say you remember the guy is from Boston. So type:
Boston
As you start typing, you’ll notice that Guy Friday automatically calls up any nugget which contains the word you’re typing. If a n onscreen nugget doesn’t contain the word, the nugget disappears.
After you type “Boston,” hit the RETURN key. Guy Friday will straighten up the random info nuggets on screen so they’re neat and tidy. In this case, two of your nuggets (Patrick Henry and John Adams) contain the word Boston, but now you have enough help to remember that it was Patrick Henry who was shouting from horseback.
Make sure the Patrick Henry nugget is selected (click it so that the racing stripes at the top of the little window are highlighted.)
Now click the on-screen button that looks like a telephone floating near keypad (oh, is that what that is?) It’s the second button from the right.
Guy Friday will automatically hilight the first telephone number it finds. In this case, it’s Patrick Henry’s fax number. Nice try, but the last time you tried squawking into a fax machine, your throat started to hurt. So tell Guy Friday to look for the next phone number. Simply hold down the CONTROL key on the keyboard (the OPTION key works just as well) and then click the telephone button again. Now Guy Friday has selected the voice phone number. Pretty neat, right?
Once Guy Friday has a phone number you like, you can have him dial it. You need to have a Hayes-compatible modem installed, and a human-compatible telephone hooked up to it. For more information, see the help item callled Dialing the phone.
Anyway, to dial the phone, remove your finger from the keyboard and click the on-screen telephone button again. Guy Friday will dial. If you change your mind and want to hang up, click the mouse before it’s too late.
Quick review
Using the on-screen telephone button is quite intuitive. Click it the first time to find a phone number in a selected nugget. Click it again to dial the selected phone number. If you don’t like that phone number, hold down the CONTROL key while re-clicking the on-screen button.
Incidentally, if Guy Friday can’t find a valid phone number, or if no nugget is selected, Guy Friday will ask you what phone number to dial. It’s useful, I suppose, if you find typing on a computer keyboard easier than on a telephone keypad. You never know.
Congratulations on completing your rigorous Guy Friday tutorial.
What to do next
Next, you definitely should read about Setting reminders. It’s available, like this was, in the Apple menu under “Guy Friday Help...”
There’s more detailed information about using the telephone in the section called Dialing the phone.
For more information about how to organize your nuggets (and who doesn’t want to read about that ?) see Hints on how to store information.
Other than that, you should be able to figure stuff out on your own. Good luck.
