Binary Software, Inc. Orders and registrations only:
2118 Wilshire Blvd Suite 900 Phone: (800) 8-BINARY (824-6279)
Santa Monica, CA 90403 or: (310) 449-1481
United States of America Fax: (800) 555-7217 or (310) 449-1473
Internet email: sales@binarysoft.com
CompuServe email: 74220,3377
America Online email: BINARY SW
ftp://users.aol.com/binarysw/
• Shareware: $10
◊ This program is distributed as shareware: if you use it please honor the shareware system by sending $10 U.S. to Binary Software at the address above. You can email, fax, snail-mail, or call. When registering please specify the name and version of this program as well as your name, mailing address, email address, phone number, fax number, and your credit card number and expiration date (we accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover). You can also pay with a check, money order, or cash.
◊ Binary Software is only collecting the registrations on my behalf; please contact me directly by email for any information, suggestion, permission, or request about this software. If you want to send non-U.S. cash or any other material including software, books, magazines, CD-ROMs or any hardware, please send it to me at my Italian address. If you do so, however, you should also notify me by email because I only receive my snail mail once per month.
◊ If you can’t afford to register you may still want to send Binary Software your name, address and email address so they can send you new product announcements and other special offers.
◊ Site licenses and group discounts are available for 5 or more registrations. Please check my ftp site or send email for more information.
◊ Please register: your support is the only way for me to keep working on cool shareware programs.
• Introduction
◊ The Coffee Timer is a very simple countdown timer I built after frying my third coffee pot. Like many other programmers, I often drink coffe while working - I mean Italian expresso coffee, the kind you make with a “moka” coffee pot. However, I don’t usually wait for the coffee to be ready before going back to work, which often results in the coffee pot being forgotten on the fire for hours. This is a programmer’s solution to the problem: a simple countdown timer with a loud alarm and a couple of other useful options.
◊ For those of you who need more flexibility in their timer, the Coffee Timer allows a KeyQuencer macro to be run when the timer times out. This lets you instruct your Mac to do pretty much anything at alarm time. The Coffee Timer works with both KeyQuencer 1.2.x and the forthcoming KeyQuencer 2.0 (which you don’t want to miss!).
◊ Quite obviously, the Coffee Timer is not limited to your daily coffee break. You can use it to remind yourself of anything that must happen in the near future… filling the bath tub? taking a short sleep? delaying a fax? Just launch the Coffee Timer and let it help your memory and your watch.
◊ You may even put an alias to Coffee Timer in your Startup Items folder to prevent yourself from sitting in front of your Mac for long periods of time. All you have to do is take a break every time the timer starts bugging you…
• Instructions
◊ File menu:
- Close: closes the timer window.
- Quit: resets and quits the timer.
◊ Timer menu:
- Reset: resets the timer.
- Display: opens the timer window if it was closed.
- Configure: lets you change the name and duration of 10 different timer events.
- Timers 1...10: sets the timer to a specific duration. This does NOT reset the timer.
- Other…: lets you quickly specify a timer duration without saving it in the one of the 10 timer events.
◊ Alarm menu:
- Show Timeout Message: shows a message when the timer times out.
- Play Alarm Sounds: plays alarm sounds when the timer times out.
- Keep Playing Forever: keeps playing forever instead of only playing 5 sounds.
- Full Speaker Volume: brings the speaker volume to its top level before playing. The volume is reset to its previous value when the Coffee Timer quits.
- Stop Playing: stops playing the alert sounds without resetting the timer.
- Run KeyQuencer Macro…: runs a KeyQuencer macro when the timer times out. This requires the KeyQuencer macro engine to be installed (version 1.2.x or 2.0.x). You can leave the macro text field empty if you don’t want to run any macro. Note that the macro text should contain the actual macro, not the name of an installed macro.
• Technical notes
◊ The timer is based on the Mac’s internal clock. Its minimum time frame is 1 second, so don’t expect it to be more precise than that. Specifically, the first second after you reset the timer may be partially cut to align the counter to the Mac’s seconds counter.
• Compatibility notes
◊ PowerPC: Coffee Timer is a fat binary, containing both 680x0 and native PowerPC code.
◊ System 7 and later: Coffee Timer runs fine on any version of the Mac OS starting with 7.0.
◊ System 6: System 6 is fully supported by Coffee Timer, although the coffee pot icon is not drawn in the timer window.
◊ All online services and bulletin boards may make it available to their users at no charge other than the normal connection fees.
◊ All non-profit user groups may distribute it at no charge.
◊ All magazines may publish it on floppy disk or CD-ROM without asking me first, as long as I get a copy of the issue containing my software.
◊ All CD-ROM shareware collections and CD-ROM magazines may include it without my prior consent, as long as I get either a copy of the CD-ROM or an offer to buy the CD-ROM at a discounted price.
◊ All redistribution companies such as Pacific HiTech, AMUG, Celestin or Educorp may distribute it, as long as I get a copy of each media containing my software and a catalog of the company’s offerings (where applicable).
◊ You may find the latest version of all my shareware and freeware programs by anonymous ftp to ftp.alpcom.it, inside the /software/mac/LMontalcini directory. The ALM Share and ALM Free packages, which contain most of my stuff and can be registered at a very low price, are also available there.
• Version history
◊ 1.0.1 - Recompiled with CodeWarrior 9 and updated documentation.
◊ 1.0 - First public release.
• Thanks to…
◊ Valentina Pavia, who waited patiently until late at night;
◊ Alberto Ricci, for his beta-testing and suggestions;
◊ Fabrizio Oddone, for all his usual help;
◊ Masatsugu Nagata, for his invaluable beta testing of all my stuff;
◊ All those who registered for my other shareware; they are now way too many to be listed, but this program wouldn’t be here without them.
• Disclaimer
◊ This software should never cause any damage, but you’re using it at your own risk. As an independent software developer, I can make no warranties whatsoever on it.
• Have fun!
◊ And don’t forget to register your shareware, so that more cool inexpensive utilities can see the light in the future.
