Umbra is ShareWare. It is not free. If you use Umbra beyond a one week trial period, please license your copy. The ShareWare fee for Umbra is only $5.00. If you send $10.00 I will send you a copy of the latest version on a floppy disk or by electronic mail.
Umbra is a screensaver. It doesn't have fancy graphics or cute creatures that run around on your desktop. It doesn't use up processor time and slow down other programs. It doesn't patch lots of system routines and cause conflicts with other extensions. It doesn't draw to the screen and cause lengthy redraws when it wakes up. It doesn't have zillions of gee-whiz modules, and it doesn't use up more than 10K of memory. It DOES simply fade the screen.
Umbra requires System 7.0 or newer, and that you have monitors that can be gamma-faded. This includes most models of Macs and monitors, but does not include some older Macs like the Plus, SE, etc. Try it.
I designed Umbra to be as small and simple as possible, and for fast downloading from online services. There is no user interface, no control panel, and no preferences file. Just drop it in your Extensions folder and restart. (You can do this by dragging Umbra onto your closed system folder and clicking OK at the dialog that appears.)
If you are handy with ResEdit, I made it easy to customize some things like sleep delay time, percentage to fade, fading speed, sleep corner and never sleep corner.
There are 5 string resources, numbered 512 through 516. You change these to strings to customize Umbra. They are also named according to their purpose.
String 512 is the time of inactivity to wait in seconds before sleeping.
String 513 is the percent to fade to. 0 is black, 100 is full brightness.
String 514 is how fast to fade. 1 is slowest, 5 is fastest.
Strings 515 and 516 are the sleep and never sleep corners, respectively. If you put the mouse cursor in the sleep corner, the screen fades. If you put the mouse cursor in the never sleep corner, the screen never fades. For these strings, 0 is no corner, 1 is top left, 2 is top right, 3 is bottom right, and 4 is bottom left.
As supplied, Umbra fades the screen after 3 minutes of user inactivity. It fades at a medium speed to zero percent. (complete black) The sleep corner is top right, and the never sleep corner is bottom right.
I don't know about any conflicts between Umbra and other programs or extensions. If you find a conflict, please let me know.
Umbra will obey a request to quit made by another program, like an installer. If this happens, you must restart the Mac to run Umbra again.
If you like and use Umbra, please send me your ShareWare license fee of $5. I will really appreciate it, and will continue to write ShareWare products. My address is:
James L. Paul
6 Chestnut Street
Bath, NY 14810
You can contact me online at:
Internet: james@netcom.com
America Online: JLPaul
CompuServe: 72767,3436
You can reach me by telephone at 0-700-ENTROPY. This is an AT&T EasyReach number. You will hear a voice menu with instructions. Follow the instructions and you will ring my home phone.
