This file is best viewed in SimpleText. It contains an exact copy of the help available from within Drop Drawers in two halves, however in this format it can be viewed separately, or printed.
Introduction
Drop Drawers is a revolutionary user-interface enhancement which provides floating pull-out, snap-shut drawers on the sides of your screen to store text, URLs, aliases, scripts, pictures, sounds, movies and anything else.
Examples of things you can store in a drawer :
• Aliases to frequently-used files, applications and folders.
• URLs for web sites you often visit.
• Snippets of text information, e.g. phone numbers or passwords.
• A catalogue of thumbnails for image files.
• AppleScripts for automating tasks.
• Email addresses for individuals you often contact.
• Multimedia formats including pictures, movies and sounds.
• Styled text phrases for easy inserting into your documents.
• Absolutely anything you can copy via the clipboard or drag and drop.
• A list of running applications (in a separate drawer).
Information in a drawer can also be worked with. For example, styled text can be edited, applications and folders can be dragged onto, URLs can be opened, scripts can accept parameters, pictures can be viewed and sounds and movies can be played.
Drop Drawers works seamlessly with any Mac OS application supporting drag and drop. It can also instantly capture and insert data within any Mac OS application. It is not just another floating application launcher, although it fulfils all those functions too.
We hope you find Drop Drawers useful and pay your shareware fee. Please send any comments or suggestions to us at support@sigsoftware.com.
Sig Software
http://www.sigsoftware.com/
Payment and Registration
Drop Drawers is freely distributed as shareware. You are permitted to evaluate it for 30 days before discarding it, or purchasing a license.
Licensing
You must purchase one license for each computer on which Drop Drawers is used. Licenses can be purchased with the enclosed Register Drop Drawers program, using a page on the World Wide Web, or via telephone. Payment may be made by cash, check, VISA, MasterCard or American Express.
Pricing
Current pricing is $15 per license. For excellent discounts on volume licensing, please contact us at pricing@sigsoftware.com.
Purchasing online (easiest)
• Click Purchase Online… in the about box or go to http://order.kagi.com/?BX
• Wait for your web browser to load up the page.
• Select how many of which products you wish to purchase.
• Enter your name, address and email address in the areas provided (all are required).
• Please enter any additional comments in the space provided.
• Follow the instructions on the web page to enter your credit-card details.
Purchasing via email
• Click Purchase Alternative… in the about box or run the Register Drop Drawers program.
• Enter your name, address and email address in the areas provided (all are required).
• Select how many of which products you wish to purchase.
• Please enter any additional comments by clicking the speech bubble next to the product name.
• Select the VISA, MasterCard or American Express payment method and enter your card details.
• Click the Copy… button to copy out the text for emailing.
• Create a new email message in your email software.
• Choose Paste from the Edit menu.
• Address the message to shareware@kagi.com and send it.
Purchasing over the telephone
• Call (US) 510 658-5244, available 10am to 5pm PST weekdays and at some other times.
• Follow the instructions on the telephone.
• When asked, specify how many, of which products you wish to purchase.
• When asked, state your name, address and email address clearly (all are required).
• Please note that telephone orders carry an additional handling charge of $5.
Purchasing via fax
• Click Purchase Alternative… in the about box or run the Register Drop Drawers program.
• Enter your name, address and email address in the areas provided (all are required).
• Select how many of which products you wish to purchase.
• Please enter any additional comments by clicking the speech bubble next to the product name.
• Select the VISA, MasterCard or American Express payment method and enter your card details.
• Click the Print… button to print out the form for faxing.
• Fax the printed form to (US) 510 652-6589.
Purchasing by mail (slowest)
• Click Purchase Alternative… in the about box or run the Register Drop Drawers program.
• Enter your name, address and email address in the areas provided (all are required).
• Select how many of which products you wish to purchase.
• Please enter any additional comments by clicking the speech bubble next to the product name.
• Select the Check, Cash, VISA, MasterCard or American Express payment method.
• If you are purchasing by cash, select the currency you wish to pay in.
• If you are purchasing by credit-card, enter your card details.
• Click the Print… button to print out the form to sent with your payment.
• Send to: Kagi, 1442-A Walnut St PMB #392-BX, Berkeley, CA 94709-1405, USA.
After you have purchased
Shortly after your payment has been processed by Kagi, you will automatically receive an email with the subject Thanks for your Payment confirming your purchase. Shortly thereafter you will be emailed your permanent license code or contacted if there is a problem (a human has to check your details before sending a permanent license). If you wish to trace an order, please contact support@sigsoftware.com.
Getting Started
Drop Drawers can have any number of drawers showing or on disk. Each drawer is a self-contained file which can be moved around and passed to other users of Drop Drawers.
Types of drawer
Drop Drawers currently offers two types of drawer - clip drawers and process drawers. Clip drawers are the mostly commonly-used type and can be used to store text snippets, pictures, URLs, aliases to files, scripts, sounds, movies and anything else. The user is in full control of what a clip drawer contains. Process drawers perform a separate function by providing a list of all the applications running on your computer and the user cannot add more items to this type of drawer.
Creating drawers
To create a new drawer, use the New submenu of the File menu. Choose Clip Drawer or Process Drawer to create a new drawer based on the default settings. Alternatively, choose an item below the separator to create a new drawer based on one of the available drawer templates, which are stored in the Drawer Templates folder (see the About Drawer Templates document in that folder for more information.) Any new drawer file will automatically be placed in the Drawers folder in your Preferences folder (but can be subsequently moved) and you will be presented with the Drawer Options window allowing you to change many of the drawer’s settings.
Moving, sizing, expanding and contracting a drawer
Drawers and their tabs can be resized using the shaded corner adjusters. Once the drawer is sized correctly, choose Lock Drawer and Tab Size from the Placement panel in the Drawer Options window (see next topic) and the adjusters will disappear. Alternatively, press Command-S. (Please note that, if a drawer sets its size automatically, some of its dimensions will be fixed and the adjusters may not appear. This applies to all process drawers, clip drawers with certain arranging options and tabs whose size is set automatically. Changes can be made to these settings in the drawer’s options window.)
Drawers are expanded and contracted by clicking the tab or dragging it towards or away from the screen edge. Unless automatic expanding has been switched off for a drawer, it will also open automatically when the mouse touches the edge of the screen within the tab and close again when the mouse leaves.
Drawers can be placed on any side of any screen by dragging the tab along the screen edge or using the Placement panel in the Drawer Options window (see next topic). Drawer tabs can be moved relative to the drawer by Command-dragging.
Filing operations on drawers
Existing drawer files can be opened by double-clicking in the Finder or choosing Open Drawer… from the main File menu. To close a drawer, choose Close from the main File menu or from the File submenu of a drawer’s contextual menu (accessible by control-clicking). To close a drawer and move its file to the trash, choose Delete…. To hide a drawer, choose Hide. Hidden drawers continue to respond to key presses and speech recognition but are no longer displayed on screen. To show a hidden drawer, choose the drawer’s name from the Drawer menu in Drop Drawers (it will be displayed in italics).
Information within clip drawer files is stored as efficiently as possible. However, over time, clip drawer files may begin to contain wasted space (similar to disk fragmentation). To free up this space, choose Compress from the File sub-menu in the clip drawer’s contextual menu. The menu item will tell you how much disk space compression will save. You may want to compress a clip drawer before sending it to someone else, e.g. over email.
Saving drawers
There is no need for you to save your drawers manually – underlying Drop Drawers is a robust database engine which automatically saves the necessary parts of drawers whenever necessary.
Drawer Options
Drop Drawers lets you configure many settings for each drawer in the Drawer Options window. To open the options window, choose Options… from the drawer’s contextual menu (accessible by control-clicking).
Those settings which are common between clip and process drawers are described in this section – see subsequent sections for options specific to a particular drawer type.
Placement
• Location. This sets which side of which screen the drawer is located on. You can also set the screen and screen side by dragging the rectangular adjuster in the center of the drawer’s edge.
• Floating. This sets whether and when the drawer and its tab should float above all other windows on your desktop. If it is set to Never, the drawer will always act more like an ordinary application window.
• Lock Drawers and Tab Size. Once you are happy with a drawer’s sizing, select this. The adjusters on the drawer and tab will disappear and the drawer’s size will be fixed. Please note that a drawer’s adjusters may remain hidden even when this setting is on if the drawer’s size is controlled automatically. For example, a Clip Drawer can be set to adjust its width or height automatically in the Arrange All dialog box (accessible from the drawer’s contextual menu).
• Expand when Mouse at Edge. This sets whether the drawer automatically expands when the mouse touches the edge of the screen within the tab and whether it contracts again when the mouses leaves it. Drawers can always be expanded or contracted manually by clicking or dragging the drawer tab.
• Key to Expand or Contract Drawer. This allows you to set a key which will toggle the drawer between its expanded and contracted state.
• Name. This sets the name of the drawer, affecting both the name of the drawer’s file and the name shown in the drawer tab.
• Where. This shows the location of the drawer’s file. Click Show File to reveal the drawer’s file in the Finder. Click Move File… to select a new location for the drawer’s file.
Appearance
• Color Preset. This sets the background in the drawer’s tab and contents to one of the many built-in schemes, which include Apple’s iMac and iBook colors. Choose Theme from the menu to use the current system-wide theme’s background (requires OS 8.5, Kaleidoscope savvy).
• Tab. This sets the shape of the drawer tab. There are currently five options – Square (boring), Round (like Finder pop-up windows), Angled (like tabs in dialog boxes), Handle (like a briefcase) or Theme to use the system-wide theme’s tab (requires OS 8.5, Kaleidoscope savvy).
• Color. For both the drawer’s tab and contents, this sets the background. Choose Custom to use a selectable color or Theme to use the system-wide theme (requires OS 8.5, Kaleidoscope savvy). When Custom is chosen, the small color area may be clicked to change the color.
• Show Name. This sets whether to show the name in the drawer’s tab. Note: The handle style never shows the name.
• Auto Width and Depth. These set whether the drawer’s tab should be automatically sized based on the name to be displayed within.
• Fade Edges. This sets whether the drawer’s background should fade gradually at the drawer edge.
• Image. For both tabs and drawers, this area allows you to set an image to use for the tab and drawer background. Images can be copied in or out of the square area using drag and drop or the three buttons labelled Copy, Paste and Clear. Once an image has been set, it can be used according to five options – None (ignore image), Tile (apply the image as a repeating pattern), Center (display the image in the center of the area, shrinking if it is too large), Scale (scale the image so that it fills as much of the area as possible while maintaining its proportions) and Fill (scale the image to fill the entire area ignoring proportions).
Clip Drawer Options
Drawer settings which are specific to clip drawers are described in this section.
Contents
• Lock Drawer Contents. To make the contents of a clip drawer unchangeable, select this. You will still be able to copy, insert or drag items from the drawer but will no longer be able to create new items or edit old ones.
• Protect Drawer. This allows you to password-protect a clip drawer to keep its contents away from prying eyes. For example, you may want to keep passwords and credit-card numbers in a drawer. Click Set Password… to change the password if the clip drawer is already protected. To requires passwords to be re-entered after a specific amount of time, use the Auto re-protect setting in the main Drop Drawers preferences. (Technical Information: Drop Drawers uses the well-known RC5-32/12/16 encryption algorithm, developed by RSA Data Security, Inc. Drawer passwords are converted into the 16-byte encryption keywords and cannot be discovered from the drawer file.)
• Use Speech Recognition for Items. This option allows items within clip drawers to be activated by speaking their name (as defined in the item’s options). When an item’s name is spoken, one of the following actions is performed: text and pictures are inserted, aliases and URLs are opened and sounds and movies are played. Drop Drawers uses Apple's Speech Recognition Manager so its performance depends entirely on Apple – to change recognition settings, use the Speech Control Panel. Speech recognition is disabled if the Speech Recognition Manager is not installed (it comes with System 8.6 or later but can be installed on any system going back to 7.5).
• Key to Copy Selection into Drawer. This allows you to set a key to copy the selection from any Mac OS application and paste it into the clip drawer. Unless the Finder is in front, this feature works by sending a Command-C key press to the frontmost application and picking up the data from the clipboard. If the application does not interpret the Command-C key press correctly, it will not work with this feature of Drop Drawers. If the Finder is in front, Drop Drawers queries it to ask which file is currently selected, and creates an alias to that file inside the drawer.
• Show Grid. This sets whether a grid should be displayed within the drawer. The grid style can be chosen from the pop-up menu – Bevel, Inset, Lines and Dots are currently available. If the Lines or Dots style is selected, a color may also be chosen using the color box which will appear. The grid size can be edited by either dragging the black square in the grid preview area or by directly entering the pixel sizes in the provided fields.
• Keep Arranged. This controls some basic arranging options for the drawer. The Grid Size setting ensures that each drawer item is sized according to the grid dimensions. The Clean Up setting ensures that items are placed in an orderly fashion. The Grid Align setting aligns drawer items to grid squares (whether the grid is shown or not). Click More Options… to see the full range of drawer arranging options (the Clip Drawer Arranging help section contains more information).
Item Display
• Default Font, Size, Style. Whenever text is displayed within a clip drawer and does not have style information associated with it, it will be displayed in the font, size and style selected from these menus. Item or file names will also be shown in this typeface.
• Alias, Text, URL, Picture, Movie, Name, Thumbnail. These set how to display items within clip drawers. Each drawer can be displayed differently.
Process Drawer Options
Drawer settings which are specific to process drawers are described in this section.
Arranging
• Maximum Item Size. This area allows you to set the maximum size for items displayed within the process drawer by dragging one of the four black handles on the displayed icon. Unlike clip drawers, process drawers cannot contain items with mixed icon sizes and name positions.
• Sort By. These two options determine whether items in the process drawer are sorted by the name of the process or in the order of when the process was launched.
• Sort Direction. These three options determine the direction in which process items should be ordered.
• Spacing. This setting determines how much, if any, spacing should be left between process items.
Item Display
• Default Font, Size, Style. Process names will be displayed in the font, size and style selected from these menus.
• Show Background-only Processes. To show all processes running on your system, switch this setting on. A background process does not have a menu bar and cannot be brought to the front.
• Highlight Frontmost Process. To display a shaded rectangle behind the process which is currently in front, switch this setting on.
• Show Process Name Background. This sets whether to display a light background behind process names.
