Author: A.P.P.L.E.

By Eric Shepherd www.A2Central.com About the Author Eric Shepherd is the webmaster of A2Central.com in Tracy, California and is also the director of Syndicomm.com. He is involved primarily in bringing many of the software packages from the 1980’s into the freeware realm by writing to the individual authors to gain the releases. Please note that A2central.com is not related to the magazine from the early 1990’s. The Card I wandered by my mailbox yesterday, as I do just about every…

The latest of the Star Wars Episode II (Attack of the Clones) trailers was recently added to the official Star Wars website at www.starwars.com. The latest trailer shows much-improved cohesiveness between the scenes and a few a different twists on the plot being shown to the public. Although the scenes are fluid and nice, the free version of Quicktime only allows a medium sized view of the clips. In order to truly experience the power of the Episode II clips,…

A.P.P.L.E. Glimpses is a product introduction article. Each month, we will be introducing items which we think are noteworthy here. Although items are listed here, it does not mean an endorsement. It only means that we figured the item was interesting enough to be noted to the Apple community. This month we have a nice variety of items. We hope that you will find them as interesting as we did. If you do decide to purchase a product we mention…

Extend the life of your PowerPC machine with Linux Loveland, Colorado — 26 March 2002 — Terra Soft Solutions, Inc., the leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions announces shipment of Yellow Dog Linux 2.2, the most mature and complete PowerPC Linux distribution available. Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 offers an array of improvements over v2.1 with the most advanced, stable release of the 2.4 kernel, improved support for the Apple ADC monitors, and accelerated video. The screen brightness and volume…

21 March 2002 Tokyo Japan Steve Jobs opened Mac World Expo in Tokyo, Japan today with a keynote that seemed to draw something back to Apple that had been missing for a while.. Although he had given a speech just over one month ago in San Francisco, Jobs came to Tokyo with goodies in hand. His keynote brought cheers and applause from the crowd with his introduction of the 10gb iPod and the Cinema Display HD or High Definition as…

By Walker Archer D. Proni is the founder of Econ Technologies and the creator of the pegasus Internal SCSI hard disk drive, AE FAX, Signature GS, AutoArk, and Universe Master. II ALIVE: By the way, what does the “D.” stand for? D. PRONI: Duilio. A fine Italian name. But people have so many problems with it that I’ve just been going by “D.” for several years now. II ALIVE: How did you first become involved with the Apple II? D….

by Richard SpitzerII ALive Volume 1 Number 1March / April 1993 After writing a letter or two in AppleWorks’ Word Processor, you’ re then stuck with the problem of addressing the envelopes. It just seems inelegant to use something as archaic as a digital encoding device (also known as a pen) to do it after writing the rest of the letter on the computer. Yet the labels produced from AppleWorks’ Database aren’t really worth the effort for one or two…

by Phil Shapiro II Alive Volume 1 Number 1March / April 1993 Apple IIe computers have long been a favorite of experimental psychology researchers. It’s easy to write short Applesoft BASIC computer programs to present information in a random fashion. And you can use the IIe’s eight slots to hook up all sorts of external electronic devices. (The external devices can either be controlled by the Apple IIe. Or the lie can gather and analyze data generated by the device.)…

by Don Grout II Alive Volume 1 Number 1March / April 1993 Computer software exists for almost every educational application. There is software for science simulations, math drills, word processing, accounting simulations, history tests, geography, music, art, and foreign languages. But is there something inexpensive (or free) that an ordinary classroom teacher, with minimum computer skills, can use for one-on-one computer study or review in virtually any subject area? Absolutely-if you can enter data and have a little familiarity with…

II Alive Volume 1 Number 1 March / April 1993 Sneak Peek, Page 9: “Drift Dodgers” subhead, fourth paragraph: A page length of 2.1″ does not mean 2 inches and one line (at ‘1/6’ or ‘1/8’ depending on the lines per inch setting) as implied in this article. AppleWorks instead takes your request of 2.1″ and uses the closest page length your printer supports with the current lines per inch setting. (Actually, AppleWorks keeps track of the total length of…

By Bill Carver II Alive Volume 1 Number 0January/February 1993 If your printouts don’t look quite as good as you’d like them to, do something about it! Simple things like a printer cleanup or a good ribbon can help immensely, and there are also software solutions that can make your printing look its best. In the end, you may decide you need a new printer to replace your ImageWriter- today’s latest mode ls make laser-quality output surprisingly affordable. This is…

by Don A. Hoyt II Alive Volume 1 Number 0January/February 1993 Even if thunder rumbles from your database reports thanks to their massive accumulations of accurate facts, your readers may respond with gaping yawns. After all, some people sleep better in a storm. It’s lightning that does the trick. To put lightning into your reports, don’t create a new Tables format. There’s a better way! AppleWorks’ greatest strength is its integration- the ability of the word processor, database, and spreadsheet…

by Jim Flanagan The computer, if I remember my history lesson correctly in this, our baroque age of computing, was born of a need to do arithmetic computations at high speeds — speeds which are affable by contemporary measure. Today, while computers are able to fit upon our desktop, they are still far too large, while they are orders of magnitude faster, they are still too slow, and while they store compar- atively incredible amounts of data, it is not enough….

by Mike Smith LAMIR Software Corporation The hot word in programming these days is modularity. HyperCard is a good example of an application that is designed to use modules of code written in another language to extend the limited functionality of HyperTalk: hence the names of these modules (XCMDs, or external commands, and XFNCs, or external functions). You can do much the same thing for any application through the dialog box calling method — adding code to documents in the form…

by Dan Shafer Browse. The lowest level of access to HyperCard. All you can do if you’ve been relegated to the ranks of the “browsers,” is go from one card to another. Open a new stack. Go Home. Not much else. So, you’d think the go command would be the simplest, most straightforward word in the HyperTalk vocabulary. You’d be wrong.  In recent weeks, my CompuServe friends and I have been talking about two interesting aspects of this often-used but…

Elon GasparPresident of Bright Star Technologies, and developer of HyperAnimator Joseph MatthewsHyperAnimator Programmer The future evolution of the Macintosh interface may well include something Apple calls an “anthropomorphic agent” — a software-based lifeform that would reside in your computer, talking and listening to you, acting for you at your behest. Such an agent would be a kind of artificially intelligent alter ego, a software version of yourself that would know something about your style, your passions, your work habits, that…

How and Why to Use External Commands and Functions By Christopher Watson It is now evident that a new trend in programming has attracted a significant part of the Macintosh community. In growing numbers, novice programmers use HyperCard and its built-in language, HyperTalk, as a springboard toward involvement in higher levels of development. This makes good sense for several reasons. To begin with, HyperTalk is well suited as a beginner’s language, and learning it provides a quick and easy method…

by Raines Cohen Last January’s MacWorld Expo in San Francisco featured a number of announcements exciting to HyperCard developers. Some were notable in and of themselves, while some represent milestones in discussions that began long ago and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The most talked about software of the show was, of course, SuperCard from Silicon Beach Software. SuperCard is a HyperCard-like package that is highly compatible with the Apple product yet goes beyond what HyperCard can now…

By Dennis Austin It takes a lot of planning to put together a memory policy, and you never get it right the first time. No matter how much time you spend, it always seems you could be using memory more efficiently. The memory manager offers a wealth of tools for its control. The grow zone function is probably the most powerful, but it is only a tool, not a solution. This article explains ways you can use the grow zone…

Programming in C By Allen Holub Most Mac compilers claim to support the ANSI C Standard, in fact they support a subset of ANSI. Among the features most often omitted from that subset are the new preprocessor directives. The program described in this article corrects this problem to some extent. It is a C preprocessor that augments the standard preprocessor used by your compiler, expanding macros itself in order to support token pasting and the five predefined macros specified in…