Addiction Manager is a program for helping people manage addiction to computer games. It creates aliases to programs just like the finder does. However, with Addiction Manager's aliases, you can restrict access to your programs.
Example
For example, if you should not be playing games during the week, you can make aliases to your games, restricting access from monday to friday. Then, when you double-click on a game's Addiction Manager alias, it will not work during the week. Instead, it will display a little message. If you double-click on a game's Addiction Manager alias during the weekend, however, it will open the game like an alias usually does.
To make an Addiction Manager alias to a game, just drag the game to the Addiction Manager icon and "drop" it in.
Addiction Manager will then ask you to set access restrictions for the file for each day of the week. You can restrict access during the entire day, or only for certain times of that day. You also enter the message that you want Addiction Manager to display when access is restricted.
When you're done setting the access restrictions and the message, click "OK". Addiction Manager will close and you will see a new file in the same folder as your game. Its name will be the game's name plus ".am". This is the Addiction Manager alias. Double-click it to see what happens.
If you want a visual walk-through on how to use Addiction Manager, double-click the Addiction Manager icon.
Usage Notes
You can put the Addiction Manager aliases into your Apple Menu Items folder as you would normal aliases. If you want, you can then hide the original game somewhere on your disk or make it invisible so you can't get to it easily.
Obviously, this doesn't completely solve the addiction problem since you can always get around the access restrictions by finding the original game. However, by reminding me that I should be working and not playing, Addiction Manager has been effective in reducing the amount of time I spend playing games. Aside from actually deleting the games from my hard disk, I've found that using Addiction Manager is the most effective way to deal with my addiction to games.
If someone can find another use for Addiction Manager, that's great. It will make aliases to any program, document, or folder.
Legal Stuff
This program is freeware. Although I retain the copyright, you may do anything you want with it except sell it or distribute it for profit. If you want to include it in a shareware/freeware collection, contact me at the e-mail address below. If you distribute it in any way, you must include this "Read Me" file along with it. I haven't fully tested this program so you should use it at your own risk. That means that if it does something weird, like damages a file or disk, I am not legally responsible. However, if it does do something weird, please let me know and I'll try to fix it (see below).
System Requirements
Addiction Manager requires System 7, and it's 32-bit clean. It's 68000-based code, not Power-PC code. If you want to do your part to promote quality freeware products, and feel like donating a power PC to me so that I can make Power-PC native or fat applications, you can contact me at the e-mail address below.
Bug Reports
The code is fairly simple so I don't imagine there are too many bugs. However, if you find a bug, or have comments, send me e-mail:
gherrick@umich.edu
Version History
November 1995
Addiction Manager 0.91ß fixed a couple problems with buttons in the dialog boxes, and I added support for making aliases to folders.
Thanks to Terje Bless and Alex Gottschalk for suggestions / bug reports.
November 1995
Addiction Manager 0.9ß is the first release of Addiction Manager.
