Welcome to Tea-time, a small utility for the dedicated tea drinker and computer enthusiast. I’m sometimes deep in thought and tend to forget everything around me, especially my standing tea. When I return to the kitchen later in the day the tea is cold and undrinkable. Therefore I wrote Tea-time, a small timer application to remind me/you of my/your tea after a user-defined period of time.
The current release of Tea-time started as a “one-night-hack” with rudimentary (and sometimes non-existent) error checking and hasn’t changed in its nature by now. Nevertheless I validate your inputs to satisfy 0 ≤ minutes ≤ 59 and 0 ≤ seconds ≤ 59.
• INSTALLATION
Tea-time is a fat binary compiled with Metrowerks Codewarrior Gold, i.e. it is supposed to run native on every Macintosh with System 7 or later. To install Tea-time simply drag the application to a convenient place on your hard-disk. I for myself find it useful to place an alias on my desktop for faster access; the Apple Menu Items folder inside the System folder might be a neat place, too. Please don’t launch Tea-time from any write-protected media, e.g. a CD-ROM, because Tea-time stores some settings including the last timer interval used in its resource fork.
• A NOTE TO TEA-TIME 1.0 USERS
Please rebuild your desktop database to see the fancy new icons. I’m sorry for any inconveniences this might cause to you.
• WORKING WITH TEA-TIME
After launching, Tea-time asks for the period of time your tea should draw. Clicking OK brings the Finder to front and Tea-time remains silent for the specified interval; you can, however, manually switch to Tea-time and stop the timer or quit. The Finder is brought to front because I haven’t found a way to determine the application running immediately before Tea-time was launched. Any ideas on this topic are highly appreciated.
When the timer expires you’ll hear the bell of Big Ben while Tea-time tries to bring itself to front and displays a small reminder. This works fine as long as the application currently in front is not trapped in a modal dialog; in this case you’ll hear Big Ben and see a small teacup icon alternating with the application menu icon in the menu bar. As soon as you leave the modal dialog Tea-time is brought to front and displays the reminder. Finally Tea-time automatically quits.
If you want to keep in touch with the status of your standing tea select “Show Timer” from the Tea menu. Even though there’s no title bar you can drag the window to a visible place on your desktop. The position and visibility are preserved between invocations of Tea-time.
By the way, Tea-time supports Balloon Help and accepts the Quit AppleEvent.
• LICENCE AND DISTRIBUTION
Tea-time is not free; it’s “tea-ware”. If you decide to keep Tea-time after a trial period of 15 days you should send me a tin of your preferred tea (see address below); I’ll send you the latest release of Tea-time in response. You can, however, ignore my wish but that would be very unsportsmanlike.
This software may be freely distributed via electronic bulletin boards, user groups, and person to person. When being distributed, all accompanying files are to distributed with the main program WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Tea-time is not to be included with any commercial software or any public domain/shareware package sold for profit without proper written consent from the author. Thank you very much in advance.
Tea-time is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
• PRERELEASE HELL
Special thanks (in alphabetical order) to Ingo Bartling, Dirk Müller, and Peter Schäfer for beta testing and some remarkable annotations.
• CONTACTING THE AUTHOR
Send comments, suggestions, bug reports, and any tea to:
Thorsten Kramp
Rommerscheider Höhe 10a
51465 Bergisch Gladbach
Germany
Internet: kramp@informatik.uni-kl.de
• VERSION HISTORY
December 20th, 1994
1.1 final with an optional status window and improved artwork by Ingo Bartling.
December 15th, 1994
1.0 final with Balloon Help and supporting the Quit Apple Event.
