dickie@schaefer.math.wisc.edu (Garth Dickie) (05/19/91)
Well, I have achieved system-7-ness. Others have commented on the good, bad, etc. Here are some more observations: -- University of Wisconsin Software Sales is distributing the full 11-disk package, without documentation, for $20. This is apparently a site-license distribution, rather than the user-group style distribution, and requires university ID. The only difference is the three extra disks. -- System 7.0 is, if anything, faster than 6.0 was on the Plus. I bought this machine almost five years ago! Even the balloon help isn't too bad. Of course, this is only my personal opinion. I'm sure that if I was using a IIsi for a few days and came back, it would be unbearable! Given all of the init's I've removed, it even takes up about the same amount of memory. I have 2.5 installed, and usually about 1.5 available for applications. -- The amazing missing shortcut: command right-arrow doesn't work on my Plus. It sounds like others are having this problem as well. The unmodified arrow is also intermittently inoperative. No idea what's causing this -- the KCHR resource in the system seems to be OK, and the KCHR editor sees the arrow, so the virtual keycode is just fine. -- Most annoying interface inconsistency: (There aren't very many of these around any more -- the new Finder is incredible!) Command up-arrow works the same way in the Finder and SF dialogs. Command down-arrow opens folders in both. But, it will also open documents, in the Finder but not in the SFGetFile dialog. I find myself wanting to do this almost every time! -- ResEdit tricks: ResEdit 2.1 comes with an icon family editor, which allows people with color macs to edit their color icons. It will still let those of us without to edit the ICN# member of the family, but even though the ics# is completely B&W, it won't edit it. The trick: open as hex, copy. Create an SICN, and open as hex; paste. Edit the SICN, and then copy it back to the ics# the same way. Of course, the color icons are now out of sync with the B&W ones, but on a B&W mac, it doesn't matter :-) Clearly this would be a lot easier with an Open Resource As... command. -- You don't need to rebuild the desktop for new icons: (This is especially good for editing folder icons). Create a small file, for example an empty text file. Give it the icon you want to modify, using copy and paste on the (selected) icon in Get Info. Open the file in ResEdit, and change the icon to what you want; the trick above works nicely if you don't have color. After saving the changes, the Finder won't see them. But, when you make a copy of the file, it has the new icon. So make a copy, and move the icon from there to where you want it. You never need to reboot or rebuild the desktop. Is there a shorter way of doing this? -- Naming conventions tell all: Try making copies of copies, and aliases of aliases. The first copy of 'File' is 'File copy', the second is 'File copy 2', even if you duplicated the copy rather than the original. The first alias of 'File' is 'File alias', and the second is 'File alias 2', but an alias to 'File alias' is 'File alias alias'. Presumably this means you can make long chains of aliases, and ResolveAlias will go all over looking for the original :-). -- Most annoying incompatability: ZTerm 0.85 used to use a custom KCHR to map option to control, if you had no control key. This meant that while ZTerm was running, you couldn't type option characters in the Finder, but it was still nice. This doesn't work at all now, leaving me with no way to type control characters or escape. (I didn't discover this one until I tried to leave input mode in vi -- I had to drop the connection to get out :-). So, it's MacLayers time... -- Memory Wierdness: Some programs, notably ResEdit 2.1, seem to cause blocks to be left around in the MultiFinder heap. The net result is that after quitting, I have a largest contiguous block of about 720K, with another block of about 620. So far, this hasn't been a problem, but it could be... But overall? This is the best thing since the Mac! -- Garth Dickie -- Math Graduate Student? -- dickie@math.wisc.edu
dickie@schaefer.math.wisc.edu (Garth Dickie) (05/20/91)
I wrote some rubbish about using the hex editor in ResEdit 2.1 to move data from between SICN and ics# resources, so that B&W macs can edit the small Finder icons. Of course, there is a much cleaner way to do this: ResEdit 2.1 uses 'RMAP' resources to map different resource types to the same editor. This trick is an abuse of the 'RMAP' resource: Create one in your ResEdit Preferences file, and give it the name "ics#", so that it will use this mapping whenever it wants to edit an 'ics#', and fill in the template with "SICN", so that it uses the 'SICN' editor. Very simple! -- Garth Dickie -- Math Graduate Student? -- dickie@math.wisc.edu