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EnigmA Amiga Run 1996 June
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EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso
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clicker.lha
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Clicker
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README
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1996-05-18
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Clicker 1.2: A key-click commodity
REQUIREMENTS
An Amiga running at least release 2.0 of the OS (KickStart V36 or better),
a keyboard, and a loudspeaker to hear the sounds through.
COPYRIGHT
This program is in the Public Domain. Use it as you like, distribute it as
you like, and modify it as you like.
I'm serious. Take a look at the sources, they're quite clean and readable if
you are familiar with C. It's pure ANSI C and compiles without any warnings
on at least three well-known compilers.
INTRODUCTION
This program makes a clicking noise each time you press a key.
Call me crazy (I mean really, go ahead, everybody's doing it) but I hate to
use keyboards that don't click. Why? Well first of all I find no
encouragement in a machine which just doesn't seem to care. The Amiga is a
caring and personal system and it should give you some kind of happy feedback
--just to show you that it's listening.
Second I like to type without having to look intently at the screen all the
time. Whether it's because somebody is talking to me and I have to pretend
to listen patiently while I'm really still programming, or just because the
A4000 keyboard doesn't have a reassuring clonk to it so you have to press the
keys all the way down to make sure that it got the message. Clicker lets one
type lighter and faster because one gets to know exactly how much pressure
the keys require.
Oh and third of course, it annoys the hell out of everybody in a five-meter
radius so they have something to talk about and can stop worrying about their
own problems for a minute (it's an odd thing really that so few people at
university appreciate what I'm doing for them). Try it!
INSTALLATION
This is the simple part. Just drag the program icon anywhere you like. If
you want Clicker to be started automatically when you boot your computer, drag
it into the WBStartup drawer on your system disk.
If you have a 68020 processor or better, you may want to use the program
version best optimized for your processor and rename it to Clicker instead.
Clicker.020 is for 68020 systems (plain A1200 or better), Clicker.020fpu is
for 68020 or 68030 systems with mathematical coprocessors, and Clicker.040fpu
is for systems based on a 68040 or 68060 with built-in math processor, eg.
standard A4000/040 or A4000T. These versions should be slightly more
efficient if suitable for your machine, giving up to 0.001% performance boosts
to your system compared to the plain 68000 Clicker binary in some rare cases.
The specialized versions are also slightly shorter, particularly the ones
compiled for FPU.
USAGE
Double-clicking the Clicker icon or typing its name from the shell will start
the program. Once Clicker is running, double-clicking the icon or typing the
name again will bring up the program's preferences window. This is still very
primitive (no loading or saving yet), but at least it lets you alter volume,
pitch and duration of the clicks.
The window can also be brought up by selecting Clicker's entry from the
program list in the Commodities Exchange window and clicking on the Show
Interface button. You can also disactivate and reactivate Clicker from there,
or quit the program altogether.
Here's an overview of the controls in the preferences window:
* Click Mouse Button: If you want Clicker to make its key-click noise for
mouse-button presses as well as when keys are pressed, select the "Click
Mouse button" gadget.
* Pitch: You can pick any tone from the musical scale for the key-click
noise. The frequency in Hertz is shown next to the Pitch slider;
Drag the slider to the left to get a lower tone, or to the right to get a
higher one. Unfortunately there's only a very short range of useful
pitches at the moment.
(For the musically literate user: In a vain and deluded attempt to not offend
anybody's ears the tone of the clicks can be selected over a 9-octave range of
the equal-temperament tuning based on the 440-Hertz A)
* Length: This determines how long the noise of every click should last.
Because the duration of a key click is typically very short, the Length
setting does not regulate the number of microseconds the sound is played
but the number of times the entire wave-form sample is played altogether.
This means that with the same Length setting you will get longer duration
for low pitches than with higher pitches.
OPTIONS
Shell command-line template:
PITCH/N VOLUME/N LENGTH/N CLICKMOUSE/S CX_POPUP/S
Icon tooltypes:
PITCH=<frequency in Hertz>
VOLUME=<loudness between 1 and 64>
LENGTH=<length of click>
CLICKMOUSE=<YES or NO>
CX_POPUP=<YES or NO>
DONOTWAIT
See USAGE for an explanation of the program settings.
The CX_POPUP tooltype tells Clicker to show its preferences window on startup.
If you want to put Clicker in your WBStartup, the DONOTWAIT tooltype tells the
Workbench not to wait for the program to finish before continuing its startup
procedure. Clicker will only return after you close it by sending it a CTRL-C
signal ("break") or by sending it a "Remove" message from the Commodities
Exchange window.
AUTHOR
Jeroen T. Vermeulen, currently still a Computer Science student at the
university of Leiden, The Netherlands but soon to be unleashed upon an
unprepared outside world. It will be hard for life to adjust itself to me
again, but I'll be damned if I'm going to work with Windows. Got a position
open by any chance?
Mail: jvermeul@wi.leidenuniv.nl / jtv@xs4all.nl
Phone/Fax: +31.20.6258990
REVISION HISTORY
(lots of 0.x versions that you don't want to know about unless you're one of
my beta testers, but they inexplicably insisted on remaining anonymous)
1.0 - First public release
1.1 - Now compiles with SAS/C, gcc and StormC. Makefiles included.
1.2 - Program tried to open "utitility.library" and failed of course. Ouch.
New: When channel is stolen, new one is allocated for next click.
Don't compile with gcc for now! (doesn't support vars in CHIP mem yet)
1.3 - Cleaned up source a little and gained some speed.