All told, Apple has done an excellent job designing the extremely workable and user–friendly interface we are so used to. However, there are still a few areas that could be improved—minor improvements though they may be, they would go a long way in making the Macintosh “feel right.” One such area is the ease of finding out the date and time without having to disrupt your reading of a spreadsheet, text document, or any program. Orator will tell you the time without any disruptions!
About Orator
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Orator is one of those little utility programs you’ll grow to love. What it does is it makes an FKEY that when activated will tell you either the time, date, or both.
It’s also much nicer to work with, instead of looking at a calendar or opening a DA to find out the time or date, just hit the FKEY and listen.
Orator is comptable with all Macs and is fully Mac II compatible.
Using Orator
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You MUST have MacinTalk in your system folder to use this program. To install Orator, simply choose Install Orator… from the FILE menu. A dialog box will appear and let you choose what you want the Orator FKEY to say and will let you choose which way to save Orator. You have the choice of having the Orator FKEY say the time, date, or both the date and time. If you want to install Orator to just say the Time, un-click 'Say the Date' and make sure 'Say the Time' is highlighted, it is vice-versa if you want Orator to just say the date. If you would like it to say both the date and time then make sure both boxes are checked. A new product has come on the market names 'Suitcase' that lets you run DA's, FKEY's, and Font's without putting them in the system file. This let's you easily back-up your system and keeps your system file small. If you use Suitcase choose the 'FKEY File (Suitcase)' button. If you don't use Suitcase choose 'System FKEY (Normal)'. When you are finished choosing your options click on the Install button. A window will appear informing you that the installation is in progress and if all goes well, a dialog box will appear telling you the installation was successful.
Miscellaneous
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Included in Orator’s File menu is the command “Transfer”. This menu choice allows you to run another program immediately, rather than quitting to the Finder. After you choose this command, a dialog box will appear listing the applications on your disks. Simply click on an application’s name and then click on the Transfer button and you will be transferred to that application.
Registration
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Orator is being distributed on the ShareWare system. This entitles you to review Orator before paying for it; try it out and see if you feel it is a worthy addition to your software library. If you choose to keep Orator, you are on your honor to send in the $5 registration fee and become a registered user. Otherwise you must destroy all of your copies of Orator (or better yet, give them to your friends). You are at a real advantage in that you can use Orator before you decide if you want to purchase it—please don’t take advantage of that privilege. Considerable time was spent developing and perfecting Orator and sending in your registration fee will insure the development of many more high–quality, inexpensive programs.
To make registration easy for you, we have prepared a ready–made registration form which you may print out and send in along with the registration fee. Simply choose Print Registration Form… from the FILE menu (you may wish to choose Page Setup… beforehand to set your paper size) and the form will be printed out for you. Please feel free to include any comments you have about Orator in the space provided, we need you to help make Orator the best it can be!
Thanks
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Thank you to everyone who supports the Utopian concept of ShareWare. You do make a difference.
My special thanks to Andrew Welch who helped me through the problems I had with my program.
