HSD’s Essential Strips is a collection of Control Strip modules designed to significantly enhance your interaction with your Macintosh® computer.
Essential Strips 2/95 consists of three modules: Essential Alias™, Essential Copy™, and Essential Move™. These modules solve the problem of having to navigate through many folders to accomplish simple alias creation, copy, and move tasks. They eliminate the need for cluttering the desktop with aliases to often used folders.
Future releases of Essential Strips will contain additional modules and updates to existing modules. Registered users of Essential Strips will be able to upgrade for free by downloading Essential Strips. Please see the file “Ordering Information” included in this package.
System Requirements
Essential Strips requires System Software 7.5, and either Apple’s Control Strip or Men & Mice’s Desktop Strip. Control Strip only works on PowerBook® computers, while Desktop Strip works on any Macintosh computer. An unsanctioned “patcher” for Control Strip (which may be available where you obtained HSD’s Essential Strips) allows it to be used on any Macintosh computer.
Installing
Place the files “Essential Alias™”, “Essential Copy™”. and “Essential Move™” inside the “Control Strip Modules” folder in your System folder.
If you are using Desktop Strip, you may need to put them inside the “Desktop Strip Modules” folder in your System folder, and you may wish to place them in their own subfolder so that they appear on their own strip (please consult documentation for Desktop Strip). After restarting your Macintosh computer, Essential Alias, Essential Copy, and Essential Move should appear on your Control Strip, and can be identified as shown below:
Note: If you are not yet a registered user of Essential Strips, you will have to work through this tutorial quickly. The modules will be disabled 10 minutes after system startup.
The Menu
Click on Essential Alias. A menu pops up informing you that there are “No items to open”. There is an “About Essential Alias™…” and a “Help…” menu item at the bottom of the menu.
Adding a Folder to the Menu
Open your startup disk and open the system folder. Now, select the “Apple Menu Items” folder and drag it over Essential Alias. Continue holding down the mouse button and a menu will pop up. Select “Add to menu” from the menu. Now you can quickly make aliases of files and folders to the “Apple Menu Items” folder.
Making an Alias
Drag the file you wish to alias over Essential Alias. Continue holding down the mouse button and a menu will pop up. Select “Apple Menu Items” from the menu. An alias to the file you dragged will be created in the “Apple Menu Items” folder and will appear in the Apple menu.
Notice that the menu contains the italicized menu item “Desktop”. By selecting it when you drag a file over Essential Alias, you alias the file to the desktop. “Desktop” appears italicized since it is a special destination. It may not be removed, and, since the desktop is always visible, it may not be opened.
Opening Folders
Click on Essential Alias. The menu shows “Open:” in bold at the top and now includes “Apple Menu Items”. Notice that there is a ‘•’ character marking “Apple Menu Items”. The ‘•’ signifies the last place where an alias was created. If you ever accidently create an alias of , copy, or move a file to the wrong folder using Essential Alias, Essential Copy, or Essential Move, you can easily find the file.
Now, select “Apple Menu Items” from the menu. The Finder will open the “Apple Menu Items” folder for you.
Removing Folders
Hold down the “Command” ( ) key. Click on Essential Alias. The menu shows “Remove:”. Select “Apple Menu Items“ from the menu. Click on Essential Alias again and notice that “Apple Menu Items” is no longer in the menu.
Review Exercises:
1. Place “Apple Menu Items” back into Essential Alias.
2. Add folders of your choice to Essential Copy and Essential Move. These modules behave just like Essential Alias, except they copy and move files instead of aliasing them.
Caveats
Just as the Finder will not allow you to replace a folder with a file, or a file with a folder, or a non–alias file with an alias file, neither will Essential Copy or Essential Move. However, Essential Alias automatically assigns a unique name to any alias created.
You can only drop files and folders onto Essential Alias, Essential Copy, and Essential Move. You may not drop other desktop objects, such as desktop printers.
You may not add locked volumes and folders on locked volumes to the menus, since you can’t alias, copy, or move anything to them anyway.
Depending on system activity and the number of folders you try to add to the menus at a time (yes, you can add more than one folder at a time), it may take a few seconds for the menus to update after adding folders.
Known problems
Some applications using floating palettes may cause current and future modules in Essential Strips to crash whenever they try to display a dialog box. These applications do nasty things with the your Macintosh computer’s Window Manager, and you should feel free to complain vociferously to the developers of such programs.
Advanced User Info
Advanced users may be interested in where the lists of folders that appear in the menus are stored. These lists are created by scanning the directories “Essential Alias™ ƒ”, “Essential Copy™ ƒ”, and “Essential Move™ ƒ” in the directory “HSD’s Essential Strips™ ƒ” inside the Preferences folder. Any file in these folders which is an alias to a folder is added to the appropriate menu. Each menu is rebuilt every time the contents of the corresponding folder change.
Technical Support
Registered users can obtain technical support by sending e-mail to “HSD@applelink.apple.com” (Internet) or “HSD” (AppleLink). Please include a list of Control Panels, Extensions, and Control Strip modules in your system, as well as the model of Macintosh computer (e.g. PowerBook 180c) and system software version. Please include a detailed description of any problem you may be having. Also include your name, address, and phone number, so that we may verify your status as a registered user and we may call you, if necessary, to help you resolve your problem.
Ordering Information
Please see the file “Ordering Information” included in this package.
“Essential Strips™”, “Essential Alias™”, “Essential Copy™”, and “Essential Move™” are trademarks of Hutchings Software Development. Macintosh® and PowerBook® are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
