My Precious Baby is an electronic baby calendar designed to organize all of your baby’s multimedia information. You can organize all of your baby’s digitized movies, pictures, sounds, journal notes, first events, and doctor’s visits. You can also record your baby’s birth information as well as keep up-to-date ID information. You can keep records on as many children as you wish (you are limited only by your available storage capacity). My Precious Baby is designed to make your baby’s multimedia information easily accessible and fun to review.
What are the system requirements?
You will need at least system 7.1 for minimum use of the program’s features and an 030 processor with 5MB RAM. To utilize all of the program’s features you will need system 7.5 or higher. It is recommended that you have an 040 or PowerPC processor for best performance and 8MB RAM. My Precious Baby and associated files take about 3MB of hard disk space.
Do I need any special hardware or software to use it?
In order to organize your baby’s pictures, you will need to get pictures of your baby into your computer. You can do this by use of a digital camera, camcorder, scanner or by having your favorite photo processor record your baby’s photographs on floppy disks or CD-ROM (many national photo processing chains now offer this option). In order to view movies of your baby, you will need a computer with a video-in card in order to digitize and store portions of your videotaped movies (I say portions because most people do not have the storage capacity to digitize entire videotapes). You will also need Apple’s Quicktime extension installed (Quicktime 2.5 provides the best performance and can be found at Apple’s web site). All of the other features of the program, including sounds, are handled by all Macs. My Precious Baby provides its own sound recording feature. However, you can also record sounds with any other sound recording program. NOTE: My Precious Baby will only open System 7 and AIFF sounds. If you are using another sound recording program, be sure to save your sounds in these formats.
Pictures, movies, and sounds take up a lot of storage space. A short 6 second movie can take about 1MB of storage. Depending upon the size of your hard drive, you may also need an external storage devise if you begin to collect a large number of these file types. This is a decision you can make later after you’ve begun to use the program.
How much does it cost?
My Precious Baby is shareware. It is not free. The program represents many long nights and weekends of work (I had to keep my day job). You are allowed to use the program for 14 days without charge (after 14 days, the program will cease to allow you access). If you like it and would like to continue to use it after 14 days, you are required to submit a $20. registration fee in order to receive the registration code and regain program access. You can conveniently pay by any major credit card, cash, check, or a wide variety of world currencies. A registration program is provided in the same folder as My Precious Baby. You can access it via the About window in My Precious Baby itself, or by double clicking on the registration program icon.
How can I get help using the program?
My Precious Baby offers several convenient help options. You can receive help from within the program by clicking “Help On” at the bottom of the calendar window. You can also receive help via the Apple Guide menu in the finder under the “?” at the top right hand corner of the menu bar. HTML help is also provided if you would like to use a web browser (Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer recommended). To use a web browser, open the browser and choose “Open File” under the file menu. Navigate to the “Start Here.html” file in the HTML Help folder in the My Precious Baby folder.
How do I report problems or lavish praise?
You can send comments, questions, complaints, payment, and praise to Danny Stoll at dstoll@atlcom.net or dstoll@kagi.com. Please visit my web site at http://www.cyserv.com/dstoll/index.