Wish List for Macintosh

By Rusty Hodge, Contributing Editor, Mousehole BBS

What: suitcase and MF

From: Venus (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

This works just fine, but if (heaven forbid) you read your manual, in the current version of Suitcase, Open and Close DA/Font files are disabled. If I am doing something special that requires alternative DA/Font/Fkey/snd files, I boot with Command key down into Finder, reset the open ...Files, and then Option-Cmd-dblClk the MultiFinder Icon. It’s a bit of a pain, but it works fine. I recommend stuffing as many resources into one file as possible and just working with it... I’ve got 36 DAs, 8 FKeys, 125 Fonts, and 15 Snds in one suitcase file named DAs and it works like a champ, using only one file buffer for all that. Faster booting too. (by some inconsequential fraction of a second). [Note: we have found that Edit in the current release does not seem to work with more than 24 fonts in the system. -Ed]

What: Flash command in HC

From: Greg Kearney (Howard Publications)

In HyperCard there is an undocumented command called FLASH; it is a XCMD that was added to HyperCard after Mr. Goodmans book went to press. The form is:

Flash <a number>

When called with out a number Flash will make the whole card “blink” several times. When FLASH is given a number, then it will blink the screen that number of times.

What: Control Panel stuff

From: Jim Reekes (CMS)

Opening a DA and getting only a beep usually means there is not enough memory available for the DA to live in.

Sam, what does ‘rebuilding the Control Panel’s desktop’ mean?

From: Sam (Apple Computer Inc.)

The beep heard when opening the Control Panel is telling you that it is rebuilding its desktop. The control panel keeps a desktop file similar to the Finder’s. It knows what icons to display and other fun stuff. Unfortunately, when you clear the PRam it also rebuilds the Desktop which takes a considerable amount of time if you have a large number of CDEVs.

What: Clearing PRam Sometimes Doesn’t!

From: Larry Nedry (Mousehole Download Sysop)

As I said in a previous post, I can clear PRam with an older System & Finder but not with the latest. Have you tried it with the latest, Sam I have plenty of memory (4 Meg) so that isn’t the problem. Anybody else had a problem with this ? I know of at least 2 others that have this problem also. What gives?

From: Power Hopeful (Maryland)

Larry, try giving the Finder more than the 160k that it claims. I also was having memory problems, but since I allocated 256k to the Finder things work fine.

I had an interesting and puzzling experience over the weekend. On receiving a new external hard drive, I was plagued by problems trying to set it up. I kept being told that there was no SCSI device connected in the programs I was using for that purpose. My elimination of the various things that might be causing this - such as changing the cables and even changing to a different Mac without an internal HD - had no effect on the situation. Since I have another external HD, I could pretty well eliminate the HD hardware as the cause since neither (both with terminators) showed up.

I knew it had to be a hardware problem, but I could not imagine what. Finally it occurred to me that I was using my new extended keyboard (which I don’t like). Guess what: THAT was the problem! When I switched back to the old keyboard, everything functioned perfectly. [?? I don’t get this at all. Someone please check this out. -Ed]

What: Wish List

From: Frank Henriquez (Ucla Astronomy)

A while back, I remember reading somewhere that MF was going to make DA’s obsolete, since you wouldn’t need them in a multitasking environment. NOT TRUE! The Amiga has a multitasking OS, and whenever you need the equivalent of a DA (like a calculator from within a word processor) you had to pull down screens until you got to the desktop level, open a folder, find the calculator program, then flip back to the WP. Very annoying. Having multitasking DA’s would really be great. And some code tightening in MF would really be appreciated by us folks who don’t have enough memory to do anything useful with MF. [It very much appears that MultiFinder is not useful with less than 2 Megs of memory. -Ed]

From: Alan Dail (Nasa/Langley Research Center)

I have collected a list of ideas from some of the people I work with.

• Come up with a nice way to completely eliminate any need for the Font/DA Mover. Novices have a hard time understanding what it is for.

• Eliminate limit on number of DAs.

• True Multitasking.

• 32 bit mode on Mac II implemented so you can have more than 8 megabytes of Mac system memory (ie system and application heap space). Can be a limitation in simulations. Ability to use RAM in NuBus cards as system memory beyond 1 Meg/slot.

• Virtual memory.

• Ghost copies of app that cause the original to be launched. Sometimes it is nice to have things like Edit in more than one place, but don’t want to chew up disk space. [Just run A/UX and link them! - Rusty]

• Special folder in system folder that would contain apps to automatically be launched when multifinder is launched. Would want things like MPW & HyperCard to be ghost copies of the ones in their normal folder and done in a way that it would look like they had been opened in their original place. [Script files for MultiFinder, like switcher? -Ed]

• Enhance quickdraw to be able to do postscript like things such as rotated text and objects and handle more dpi without making text unreadable. Maybe a fixedPoint version of quickdraw.

• Update all machines to have identical system calls, especially quickdraw. Color QuickDraw on a Plus or SE would work like the 1 bit mode on Mac II and allow 3rd party color monitors.

• Support Color Quickdraw in printer drivers. Use grayscales on LaserWriter.

• MPW Fortran & Concurrent Pascal. [MPW Fortran is under development by Language Systems of Herndon, VA (703) 478-0181, due for January ’88 Beta release. -Ed]

• More of OS in ROM (MultiFinder, and all those patches!).

What: Radius Accelerator

From: John S. Lee (Argon Software Technologies)

Just bought some new toys for the Mac. The Radius Accelerator w/ 68881 co-processor: This seems to work fine with MOST software. I have not had a chance to run all of my software on it, but as expected there are NO problems with TML 2.x (I am using 2.1), and NO problems with LSP 1.11. RR 9.4 will NOT work with the Accelerator (or could it possibly be the new System and Finder). My DataFrane 20 (1 year old ), needed some update software which I got today (Manager 3.21) and it works wonderfully with the Accelerator. I also have a Bering 20+20 removable and it works fine with the Radius. The drive will not boot up by itself, this is primarily due to the ROM versions inside the drive. Bering said they will ship them to me as soon as I write for them (strange, but true ). Otherwise the drive works well with the Radius. Also got the Plus expanded to 2.5 for some leg room.

If I find any discrepancies with software and the Accelerator I will post it here. But so far it seems as though it is quite a solid piece of hardware.

What: Find File suggestion

From: Jim Reekes (CMS)

Use ‘Find File’ to locate the desired file. Type Cmd-M or choose ‘Move To the Desktop’ from the menu. Double-Click the icon to open it.

When your done with this file, at the desktop select the icon and choose ‘Put Away’ in the Finder’s ‘File’ menu. Find File will also set the ‘Standard File’ dialog to the directory that the file is located in. This means that if you had used Find File in an application and located the file your looking for, then used the ‘Open’ file command from your application it would be inside the folder that you had just found your file in. Make sense? Well, why ya think they called it ‘Find File’?

I would like to see this option inside of the ‘SFGetFile dialog. That would be a cool new feature. Think Technologies has an INIT file that does this.