Although I like OnCue better than DiskTop as an application launcher, if you already have DiskTop, remember that it has an application launcher built into it. It searches quite fast, and has a popup menu for drive selection.
Here is a message to MUGs from the late Duane Blehm’s parents. They are telling us how to determine the Cairo #2 keycode (they can’t find the PUZZ’L #2 keycode, so please don’t ask), so that they won’t be continually bothered by requests.
Here it is: If your #1 keycode equals 92338 (for example), the 9 = Z, the 23 (middle two digits) = Y and the last two digits, 38, =X. It is also possible to have a six number code, in which case the first two numbers equal Z. The formula to unlock the game is Z+1 x ((Y+X) + 18). Enter the result into “Unlock” under the Options menu and click Unlock all Features.
Please do not contact the Blehms. It just reminds them of their loss.
In PageMaker 3.02, add the Option key when choosing a page view and all pages will assume the new view. Example: Option/Command/w makes all pages Fit in Window.
Here’s a low-tech solution for a LaserWriter IINTX problem, right from Apple. If the IINTX fails to print properly and you suspect low humidity as a cause, put the IINTX on 2x4 blocks and place a pan of water underneath the printer.
Grandma would have thought of that! (Thanks, Windows, MacOrange MUG, CA.)
If you delete material in a Word 4.0 document and send it to someone who opens it in Word 3.0, the recipient will see the deleted text along with everything else. (Thanks, UseNet.) Also, a Word 3.0 document opened in Word 4.0, edited and Saved As, when reopened in Word 3.0, may contains all kinds of garbage from totally unrelated documents, so act accordingly or someone will be reading material you didn’t intend for them.
SuperCard bombs with the Boomerang INIT. And SuperCard takes five megabytes for serious use.
Does your Mac keep asking for disks long since removed from the computer? First, try Command/period (Command/.) and the Mac may agree to forget it. Second, develop the habit of dragging disks to the trashcan instead of using Eject or Command/Shift 1 or 2. Then you won’t have the problem any more.
Here is a neat way to create a border in Freehand. Open a new document. Choose 10 point grid, choose Snap to Grid from the View menu. Draw a box, leave it selected, choose PostScript… from the Lines menu. Name the line diamond. in the following:
{diamond} 10 5 0 0 newrope
Click OK and print. You can export the border to PageMaker. This works because “diamond” is one of the pre-set designs in Freehand. Others include triangle, star, ball, heart, etc. Find them on page C5 of the manual. (So there, non-manual readers.)
To change the look of the border, change the numbers:
10= pattern width in points
5= pattern height in points
0= space between patterns
0= color (0=black, .5=50%, 1=white)
If you don’t use 10 for pattern width, be sure you change the grid size to match. (Thanks, Ken Weeks, Windows, MacOrange MUG, CA.)
SUM provides no viral protection, and Symantech has quit claiming that it does.
On the other hand, SAM (Symantech AntiVirus for Macintosh) is lauded as a great virus detection and repair program in a review in Washington Apple Pi. The author threw away all other virus programs once he started using SAM. $99 list, $65 mailorder.
If your envelopes accordion when printed in a LaserWriter II (my Plus NEVER accordions envelopes—so much for progress), smooth and flatten the edges of the envelope with a pen barrel or something smooth and hard.
To speed up a sluggish MacWrite II, open ResEdit, Open a copy of MacWrite, find the resources FLTI and FLTE. These are the Import (FLTI) and Export (FLTE) filters. Cut those you will never be using. The more filters you cut, the faster MacWrite II will run. If you cut too many, all you get is an error message. No harm done. Be sure you do this to a copy, since then you can toss it away and start over again. (Thanks R.P. Hall on UseNet.)
Sometimes your mouse’s front feet wear out. I know one newspaper where the Mac operator painfully pushes around a mouse with no front feet left. I maintain this will make her sick of Macs for all the wrong reasons.
Anyway, it has been suggested that you can remedy the situation by gluing a Finnish 5 pennies coin between the front feet. I guess that particular coin is just the right thickness and diameter to do the job without getting in the way.
Macs work fine when the voltage is not up to snuff. They are built with a lot of voltage latitude.
To export WINGZ charts, be sure to go to the General submenu under Graph and select no fill (n) for Plot Interior Brush. Do the same with Fill under the Format menu. MacDraw II refuses to import WINGZ charts anyway.
You already know that Saving As a PageMaker file reduces the file size dramatically. If you have a version of a document which you are sure does not need any changes, cut each page to the Scrapbook and then place the pages back in PageMaker, page by page. Each page is now a graphic. Errol Craig, on UseNet, reduced 5 megs of PageMaker files to 700k using this trick. Great, huh?
If you have an SE with an Apple hard drive 40SC with a serial number of 335505 through 1023016, and it fails, Apple will give you a new drive up through June 1990. If you have already repaired it, contact Apple for rebate paperwork.
If the guts in your hard drive are Rodime (not the brand name of the drive itself, but the internal mechanism), know that Rodime will often repair it, often charging far less than other repair entities. In the past they have even stood behind the warranties of companies which failed who were selling drives with Rodime guts in them.
You can’t beat that with a club.
Current Syquest removeable media drives may not hold up if used as the primary drive for a Mac. As of this date, all removables use Syquest guts.
If you are having on-going problems with a manufacturer, at an early date, document the problem and write the manufacturer with copies to all kinds of places, like the Better Business Bureau, Attorney General of your state and that of the manufacturer, Macintosh magazines, MUG newsletters, the parent company, etc.
Be innovative. Squeaky wheel, you know!
Clip Art Junkies! Look for a 13-disk set of Federal Clip Art. It includes aircraft, Army, insignia, missiles, Pentagon, weapons, bases, medicine, research, and many other categories. The maps are great. Everything is EPS format. The set is $225. One Mile Up, Inc., 7011 Evergreen Ct., Annandale, VA 22003, (703) 642-1177.
The first law of computer graphics is “You can fix almost any computer graphics error with an Xacto knife and a bit of wax,” according to Bruce Bittle, of the Eugene, Oregon MUG.
Secure INIT can cause problems, including data loss, so why not get rid of it? (Thanks, San Diego Resource, San Diego MUG.)
SmartArt I 1.01 DA produces spectacular PostScript text without forcing you to learn a single word of PostScript programming language. That’s not all. You can use it to preview EPS art quickly.
A bunch of additional effects are now available in SmartArt II and III.
The arrow keys on the keyboard move you through cards in HyperCard. Left and right are obvious. Up is next card in the “Recent” list and Down is previous card in the “Recent” list.
If the button tool in HyperCard is active, you don’t have to go to New Button to make a button. Hold down the Command key and click-drag a button wherever you want a new one. Drag it to any size you wish.
When new HyperCard users make stacks, they often forget to make liberal use of the Link To… feature in the New Button dialog box. This feature lets you move your user from stack to stack and card to card with ease.
When you print reports in HyperCard, fields appear on paper in the order they are selected in the “Print Reports” dialog box.
Since HyperCard’s print dialog boxes don’t save your setup, use a macro program (QuicKeys, Tempo, AutoMac III or MacroMaker) to preserve each setup as a single combination keystroke.
Don’t protect your HyperCard stack unless you have an excellent reason for doing so. Any experienced HyperCard user can defeat your protection, and “the rest of us” wouldn’t know what to do with your “cute” scripting anyway. Protecting stacks is usually nothing but an ego trip and a petty annoyance.
For example, did you know that you can edit the script of a stack from within ANOTHER stack? You use the “edit script of” handler which lets you get inside any script in the protected stack. There you can find the script lines which prevent access.
Or use one of the several Script Report stacks which clean out all of the scripts in a stack. That way you can rebuild the protected stack without protection.
Give it up, folks. It’s just a pain.
The fastest way to access a card in a script is by its id number, not its name or card number.
If you lose part of a graphic in HyperCard when you rotate it, the only salvation is Revert. Undo doesn’t help a bit in this case.
Want to find out which graphics on your card in HyperCard are opaque? Hold down the Option and O and all opaque graphics turn black.
If your power keys don‘t work in HyperCard, see if you 1) have the text tool selected or 2) have the message box visible.
Does your HyperCard prevent you from working with a locked stack? Get version 1.2 or later and you will be able to work with it.
Make sure HyperCard buttons you create “do something” to let you know that they have been pushed. This can be as simple as checking auto highlighting or playing a short sound. People need to be reassured that pressing the button has initiated some kind of action.
If your HyperCard button is going to do something that might be considered destructive, be sure you script in an “ask” dialog to confirm the action before something bad happens. You need to do this because HyperCard often has a hard time restoring things which are deleted.
In HyperCard, ten cards, each with a short note, beats hell out of one card with a humongous scrolling field. Try it!
Zooming in or out on a detail in HyperCard is best accompanied by the Zoom Out and Zoom Close visual effects.. Zoom Out to see detail. Zoom Close to return to The Big Picture.
Commercial HyperCard stacks often include a map of the stack consisting of miniature pictures of key cards in the stack. You can do this, too. Just hold down the Shift key when you Paste the copied card onto the map page. The result is a mini-card. Overlay the mini-card with a transparent button. Script the button to take you to that real card.
Are your TIFF files too big to take to the service bureau on an 800k floppy? Try scanning at 150 dpi instead of 300 dpi. The file takes less space, and when used in a DTP program, prints out the same as long as the final image size is the same. Reducing a 150 dpi image to the same size as a 300 dpi image results in the same resolution.
That hint came from the newest Macintosh newsletter, the Weigand Report. This no-ad newsletter looks good and contains solid Mac information on desktop publishing. Desktop publishers should try a year of it, 8 issues, at $48.00. P.O. Box 647, Gales Ferry, CT 06335.
If you FAX documents, listen to Adobe. They found that Lucid Roman and Lucida Sans are the best fonts to use. Next come Stone Sans and Corona. Then Bookman Light. (Thanks, The Weigand Report.)
If your PageMaker screen shows fonts missing their tops, its probably because you have changed the leading. To get a better WYSIWYG view, refresh the screen. The easiest way to do this is to grab the size box in the lower right corner and jiggle it. The screen refreshes immediately.
If you use “electronic whiteout” in the form of white, no line shapes, I’ll bet you haven’t thought of using various Zapf Dingbat characters reversed to cover oddball shapes. That’s because you don’t subscribe to The Weigand Report, which includes this and a lot of other neat hints.
Member Elaine Weiss of Salt Lake City reports that Word 4.0 won’t let you do manual page breaks on any page with a table on it. She says it must be an “undocumented feature,” since Bill Gates pledged that the program would be bug free.
I long ago quit worrying about preserving the GetInfo… comments which are lost when you rebuild the desktop. My GetInfo… comments are safe and sound on the master copies of applications on locked floppies. So they don’t get erased anyway.
But if you do worry, there is a fix. Before you rebuild the desktop (rebooting while holding down the Option and Command keys), Open ResEdit. Open Desktop. Click on FCMT (must mean File CoMmenT)
Copy the FCMT line. Name it Saved FCMT. Copy the Saved FCMT to the Clipboard. Close ResEdit, saving changes as you leave.
Now rebuild the desktop.
Next, open ResEdit again. Open Saved FCMT. Copy it. Open Desktop. Paste. All of your GetInfo… comments are back where they belong. (Thanks, Verna Webb, A32 Apple Users.
Here are some known INIT and cdev conflicts:
MacroMaker conflicts with applications
using Macintalk, with MS
Works and some others
Boomerang 2.ob7 conflicts with Rebound
and SuperCard
Center INIT freezes screen sometimes
Findswell crashes sometimes
FlashWrite some Word 4.0 problems
WindChooser conflicts with Giffer 1.01
Eureka 1.01 conflicts with Pyro when
graphs are made
Freestart 1.0 conflicts with QuicKeys
and ShowPICT
Here are INITs and cdevs with no apparent conflicts:
INIT cdev ClockAdjust
Hier DA 0.9984 Pyro (but see Eureka)
Dimmer Kolor 1.0
QuicKeys Sound Master
SuperClock 3.5 Vaccine
Aesthete aShowPICT
Big Tiles Superspool
Remember, this is just one Maccer’s list—Gary Ouellet, CompUServe 73277,2757. Contact him with other INIT/cdev conflicts. (Thanks, appleJAC Digest, Central Missouri MUG.)
Here is the simplest script I have seen to make two HyperCard fields scroll together, lining up related items in the two fields. Place this script in each field’s script:
on mouseWithin
set the scroll of field “the other field” to the scroll of me
-- where “the other field” is the field name of the field you wish to scroll in tandem with this one (me).
end mouseWithin
Be sure the Text Height and number of lines are the same for both fields.
Think about the above script for a moment and I’ll bet you can think of a way to have three or more fields scroll together in tandem.
Canvas 2.0 lets you replace attributes globally in a drawing. For example, change all lines drawn with #1 pen width to #2 pen width.
Hold down the Option key, go to the Edit menu and Select All with the cursor. Now go to the Tool box and select the attribute to change (#1 pen in this case). This selects all #1 pen lines. Now select the attribute to replace #1 pen lines with (#2 pen in this case). Canvas changes all #1 pen lines to #2 pen lines.
To autotrace better in Canvas 2.0, select the bit maps and choose the Object command in the Object menu. Change resolution in the dialog box from 72 dpi to 300 dpi. Click OK. Close the box and autotrace. The increased resolution creates more handles, making editing easier, too.
Deneba’s Comment DA can be a Scrapbook. Hold down the Option key and select Scratch Note. Enter a name for your picture in Document Box. Tab. Enter descriptive material. Return. Paste the picture. Your picture is now listed in the Note Manager and can be retrieved there.
