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This issue of Open Mike takes you on a wild and wonderful journey into the wonderful world of warm electrons, courtesy of your local electric company. With this issue, we begin reshaping Open Mike, based on the feedback we've received from readers. Many of you have asked for more code snippets, small scripts that tackle specific problems. Well, we're introducing a new regular column, called Snippet Show. Each column will introduce several small, but useful scripts and explain what they do and why. If you've been looking for a good place to "lift" some code, Snippet Show should be your starting point.
Although we've officially said goodbye to Iconographically Yours as a regular column, it will make appearances every once in a while. Until then, you'll have to settle for some resources of a different type. XFCN Mania II brings you three completely new XFCNs, written exclusively for Open Mike. Add functionality to MicroPhone with these useful goodies.
Sometimes, to solve the most complex problems, you need to use simple solutions. For example, I compose messages offline, while I am not connected to a service. Then, I connect to the service and send my preformatted messages. Problem is, some services let you use a protocol transfer such as ZMODEM to send messages. That's fine, if you have composed your messages with hard carriage returns at the end of each line. But most people on Macs don't operate like this. Instead, we don't hit the carriage return until we're ready to begin a new paragraph. This poses a problem to services that assume that text sent with a protocol has been formatted with line breaks after every 80 characters or so. I can manually type in all those carriage returns after I finish composing my messages. Or, I can figure out a way to let MicroPhone do the work for me. Take a look at Hacker's Hangout to see how this problem is solved.
As the Internet becomes more and more popular, I've been receiving requests to include some tutorials and examples that might help neophyte Internet trekkers. We're addressing this issue and should have some good examples in a future issue of Open Mike. Until then, happy scripting!
