dplatt@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Dave Platt) (09/02/87)
While installing PD/shareware stuff on a friend's new Mac II last night (see my previous posting for information about games that run on the II) I tried most of my collection of screen-savers to see which, if any, would work. Most don't; one does. The Mac II in question has 1 meg of memory, the Apple video card (4-bit pixels), and an Apple monochrome monitor; the control panel was set in the black-and-white, 16-shade setting. AutoBlack Didn't try; uses alternate screen buffer and almost certainly won't work. Fade to Black BOOM! ScreenSave Put up the menu, but the screen didn't blank after two minutes of disuse as I requested. May be disfunctional, or may be stepping on memory? ZoomIdle Blanks out (and runs string art in) a window in the upper-left corner of the Mac II screen. Guess how big the blanked window is! New Idle Works like a charm! Blacks out entire screen, flashes a moving trash-can, and restores the screen properly when the mouse is clicked. [Requires that applications understand and correctly process the "Hey, your window has just been uncovered; refresh it!" event]. I don't recall whether New Idle chews up CPU while the screen is being blanked, or whether it moves the trashcan around via a VBL task of some sort (as AutoBlack does). If the latter, then it should be possible for tasks such as spreadsheet recalculations, long downloads, and so forth to run while the screen is being blacked out; if the former, then New Idle is useful only when the Mac is really not being used. New Idle must be invoked manually from the apple menu whenever you wish to blank the screen; it does not automatically blank out the screen after N minutes of screen inactivity. HEY APPLE: How about building a screen-blanking capability into MultiFinder, akin to the one in New Idle but which automatically blanks the screen after several minutes of no-user-generated-events?
barad@othello.usc.edu (Herb Barad) (09/03/87)
In article <16292@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> dplatt@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Dave Platt) writes: >While installing PD/shareware stuff on a friend's new Mac II last >night (see my previous posting for information about games that run on >the II) I tried most of my collection of screen-savers to see which, >if any, would work. Most don't; one does. Autoblack will not work on a Mac II. I don't have a Mac II, but I know someone who has tried it. I just bought Suitcase yesterday and a freebee came with it called "Pyro" - it is a screensaver that (at least as advertised) works with any Mac (with system 3.2 or greater) and any screen. In fact, it should work in color on a color monitor. Pyro puts on a little fileworks display when the machine has been idle for a specified period of time. Kinda nice. Pyro can even be adjusted as it shows up in the Control Panel. One drawback, Pyro DOES suspend the current program. Background tasks keep going (print spoolers, Appletalk, etc.), but foreground tasks are suspended. This is not quite as nice as Autoblack, but both are invoked automatically. I still prefer Autoblack, but Pyro is would win where Autoblack doesn't work. Herb Barad [USC - Signal and Image Processing Institute] email: barad@brand.usc.edu or ...!sdcrdcf!oberon!brand!barad